THE THEATRES.
THE new farce of the Boarding School, at the Haymarket, is the plea- santest and cleverest of the season : its humour is broad without inde- cency, and its satire pungent without bitterness. The young ladies' boarding-school is represented in its different states with a literal truth that makes the sarcastic touches tell with forcible effect : first, the long procession appears, winding like a beautiful serpent, diminishing towards the tail, where its sting, the formidable governess, is seen erect and threatening ; next the playground is shown, where the demure misses changed into hoydens, run riot in romping and mischief; and then we are introduced into school with its forms and formula, where every face wears the mask of study, though only a few venture to peep from behind it. Miss P. HORTON, Mrs. STIRLING, and Miss CasaLss, are the ringleaders of the sport, carried on with the assistance of three officers, who beguile the tedium of country-quarters by making extempore love to the school-girls: billets are exchanged, which are -read aloud for the benefit of the audience, and the governess is sent into fits at surprising a triad of red-coats kueeling at the feet of three monitors at the precise moment when she introduces an admiring father to the playground to witness the efficacy of her discipline. The enemy, though routed, returns to the attack, not by open assault but in am- bush: the gallants assume the guise of masters, and proceed to give lessons in the art of love to their ardent pupils before the face of the teacher herself; whose horror at the deception surpasses that of the governess. Mrs. W. CLIFFORD, as Mrs. Grosdenap, is the very model of the stately schoolmistress : she stalks sedate, propriety personified ; dictionary and grammar drop from her lips ; she declaims elo- quent prospectuses, and deals out cards of " terms" at every wave of her band : the enumeration of items essential to the acquisition of know- ledge in boarding-schools, such as silver forks, napkins, and the like, is to her an easy task, though the catalogue of requisites is of the longest : the lofty fluency of her recital of the various studies that occupy each quarter of an hour in the day—learning being imparted in homceopathic
d oses—has an oracular impressiveness ; and the air of dignified supe- riority to pecuniary considerations with which she silences the rustic's objection to the "eighty guineas per annum, besides extras," is calcu- lated to shame the mercenary objector into acquiescence. Mrs. CLIF- FORD, in her rhubarb robes of rustling silk, advancing under a brown parasol as if it were a canopy of state, looks like a grave burlesque of _Minerva, with all the owl in her face, bringing up the rear of a troop of neophytes.
Mr. REES, as a fat duodecimo page, ogling the girls and making love to their shoes that he has to clean, is a ludicrous figure; but the cha- racter raises expectations of fan that are not gratified.
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