An excellent type of low, dogged, habitual inebriety, is presented
by Mr. Phelps in his impersonation of Christopher Sly, the comic hero of the " Induction" to The Taming of the Shrew. The play, revived at Sadler's Wells on Saturday, has not been acted in its entirety, save at the Haymarket in 1844, within the memory of many generations —al- though Katherine and Petruchio, as Garrick's abridgment is called, has always been a favourite afterpiece. From the effect of the representation at Sadlees Wells we may gather the inference, that our immediate an- cestors were not such mere blockheads in theatrical affairs as rigid Eliza- bethans would have us suppose. The story in which Katharine and Pe- truchio (played with excellent spirit by Miss Atkinson and Mr. Marston) are the principal figures, shakes the audience with laughter; and the " Induction," with the tinker of Mr. Phelps, is a choice little bit of low comedy : but the dull tangled tale of Bianca and her suitors is scarcely worth the trouble of reviving, lacking as it goes all the practical " fun ' and ingenuity which belong to the Comedy of Errors' while it is marked by the same puppet-like treatment of the personages that belongs to that primitive work.
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