THE THEATRES.
Though the Princess's opened on Monday, it was without Milt : the main body of the forces mustered, and showed a good front on parade, but the chiefs have not yet taken the field. Active operations commence next Monday; when Macready, after three years' absence from the London stage, makes his first appearance on these boards, in Hamlet. The vocal- ists were heard but in the National Anthem; and the only novelties were a couple of farces that preceded respectively Katherine and Petrachio and the Brigand. One of them, called Advice to Husbands, is a sentimental farce, turning upon the extraordinary circumstances of a wife not recol- lecting her truant husband after seven years' separation ; and the husband being content to let his wife unconsciously commit bigamy unless he suc- ceeds in winning her, as a stranger, in an hour's wooing! Mrs. Stirling played the wife with such touching earnestness, that the preposterous plot was forgotten in the sympathy she excited. James Vining—who is the substitute for Walter Lacy—played the husband; and had the difficult task of being alternately comical and tragical, without any opportunity of giving the audience a cue to the successive emotions. In the other farce, The Man Without a Head, there was no doubt as to the intention of the author to make merriment ; but the means resorted to for the purpose were so out- rageous, that Compton's blank looks of oblivious bewilderment could hardly reconcile people to the possibility of a bridegroom forgetting his own name and that he was just married—even in farce. In opera, Mademoiselle Nau is to be prima donna. Madame Vestris and Charles Mathews also are engaged; and two or three French dancers, who are to appear in a new Parisian ballet, Le Diable a Quatre. Operas by Messrs. E. Loder, Macfarrem and Howard Glover, are promised.
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