• Nosy that the Opera and Covent Garden are closed,
the Haymarket and the English Opera will fill better. The new pieces that Mr. ARNOLD has brought out at the Olympic have attracted good audiences. REEyE'S Jack Rag, in the Climbing Boy, is a finished picture of a Street-:sweeper, that is worthy of ()STADE; whose boors by the way, REEVE-Very much resembles, when he plays the sot, only that he has more jollity and less brutality. His animal spirits are prodigious ; he revels in his part, and runs riot in fun. " His delights are dolphin- like, and show their backs above the element they live in." He seems as he were tossed in a blanket of laughter, that shakes and is shaken by the whole audience. Up he goes with a peal of laughter, and down he comes with another roar. He tills the stage like a balloon, and goes bounding about from side to side, with most impatient contempt for solid footing.
• Miss KELLY, in a new part, the Dilosk Gatherer, positively harrows up the feelings by the vivid truth with which she depicts the agonies- of a Mother at losing her infant, which is carried off by an eagle, and the horror of suspense as to the fate of her child. No other actress could do the like. But heart-rending is not the true province Of the drama ; and a display of sheer misery, physical or mental, is by no means pleas- ing to ordinary sympathies.- Nothing, indeed, but the enforcement of a moral can justify the introduction of bodily or even mental suffering upon the stage ; and even then, it requires the aids of genius and fancy to sublime the picture of ideal wretchedness or to lighten the oppressive load Of human endurance. If we wish to "sup full of horrors," we can go at once to the fountainhead of misery, the madhouse or the condemned cell. It is needlessly giving pain to an audience, merely that they may experience the relief of knowing that the woes are fictitious, and admire the skill of the performer. In the present case, the flimsiness of the dramatic fiction is in striking contrast with the force of the acting. All that the dramatist does, is to weave a web of most bungling trans- parency, through which we contemplate a scene of melodramatic hor- ror. Nevertheless' since the Dilosk Gatherer is on the stage and re- presented by Miss KELLY, it is worth a painful sensation to witness her wonderful and beautiful acting, if it were only to see what talent and eeling, directed by the study of nature, can accomplish.
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