Qt Quirts.
Although there is no doubt that a large portion of the London publie is thoroughly convinced that the editorial "we" is endowed with some preternatural power of ubiquity on every 26th of December, so that at about one o'clock in the morning of the 27th there are certain gifted in- dividuals each of whom has seen all the pantomimes in the Metropolis, and deliberately weighed their respective merits,—yet, in spite of this happy belief, we have no intention of taking advantage of the general credulity. That great high-day of the theatrical calendar falling as it did on Wednesday, we freely confess that our means of comparison are limited, and that the premises from which we draw our inferences are obtained partly indeed by the visual organ, but partly also from oral tra- dition. Nevertheless, we have been careful in testing the value of the said oral tradition; and therefore, putting together what we have seen, and what we have heard, we are fain to believe that we arrive at a pretty correct result. This, then, is our summary of the busy week's pro- ceedings:
The Drury Lane pantomime, Hey Diddle-diddle, or Harlequin ring Nonsense and the Seven Ages of Man, is marked by an ingenious adapta- tion of the speech of Jaques to the business of the introduction, but alto- gether relies more on the scenery of Mr. Beverley than on its own in- trinsic merits. Professor Anderson, who has opened Covent Garden for the joint exhibition of his own legerdemain and a pantomime called P Belle Alliance, or Harlequin Good-Humour and ye Fielde of ye Clothe of Golde, proves that he is a better wizard when he trusts to his own hands than when he has recourse to the medium of Harlequin's bat. At the Princess's, a tale of domestic grief is burlesqued with great taste and elegance in the pantomime Harlequin and the Maid and the Magpie, or the Fairy Paradise and Hanky Panky the Enchanter : but the action on the risible muscles is not equal to the gratification afforded to the eye. The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast, or Harlequin and Me Genisse of Spring, as the Haymarket pantomime is called, is a neat and graceful piece of the kind, owing much of its effectiveness to the pencil of Mr. Callcott. At the Adelphi, where Madame Celeste plays a Harlequin dressed in the old Italian costume, an attempt is made to endow pauto- mime with a Watteau sort of aspect: but the very indifferent "comic business" of Jack and the Bean-Stalk, or Harlequin and Mother Gooss at Home again, counteracts the beneficial effect of an exceedingly pretty notion very prettily executed. At the Olympic, now the sole theatre of non-pantomimic burlesque, Mr. Robson retains his eminence as Prince Richcraft in The Three Glass Distafs ; while Mr. Gray, the scene-painter, takes a good stretch upwards on his way to the temple of Fame. After giving one more fact, in the statement that Harlequin and St. George and the _Dragon, the Astley's pantomime, is to be added to the list of successes, we come to the quintessence of our verdict. The best pantomimes, we believe, will be found North and South,—that is to say, at the Princess's, (above mentioned,) and at the Surrey, where another afflicted female furnishes the subject of The Prime of Pearls, or Harlequin and Jane Shore.
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