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day. Capitalists have backed them with unbounded wealth; experience has lent them all her aid; trickery all her cunning; puffery all her placards, bills, paragraphs, and the getting up of "stories;" the press all its hundred tongues, telling of their nightly doingsbesides the special tongues in cases where a public organ has been a private engine-and what has been the result? Bankruptcies, failures, dispersions, flights, half-salaries, no salaries, farewell dinners, debts, prisons, and fresh candidates for the fatal seat. The fresh candidate, who in most cases is a fine old hand at a failure, usually finds a fresh capitalist to back him. "He is a man of such practical experience!" says the capitalist. Mooncalf! of what is his experience? Are not the practical results of all his efforts precisely of a kind to make every capitalist in his rational senses, start back from his disastrous "experience?" But there is also another peculiarity attached to a managerial lease-holder. He pays people if he can; if he cannot, he laughs in their faces. Anybody else would be arrested, or knocked down, or something. He stands in a sporting attitude; and nothing happens to him! Every now and then, when a dashing speculating sort of " man about town" finds himself totally without money, and does not know what in the world to do next, he says to himself,— "Damme! I'll take a theatre !" Very likely he will find backers with money as soon as he has taken

it; in any case, the proprietors are all too happy to let him the house. He invariably fails. Some are paid, many not. Who cares? That dashing speculator is not a scamp, "bless your heart!"-but an excellent good fellow. He has such enterprise in him!—such experience! Why, the impudent rogue absolutely risked nothing he had nothing to risk. Oh, but he has such enterprise! And thus with two unexamined catch-words-enterprise and experience - the proprietors of theatres, and the poor mooncalf capitalist, delude and injure themselves and the public.

How totally inapplicable to Mr. Macready must be any of the preceding remarks, with reference to pecuniary dealings, need not be repeated; it is the more to be regretted that the system he pursued of profuse expenditure upon extrinsic adornments, was of a kind which never can prove successful, and which, for his sake, as well as that of the poetry of the Drama, we most earnestly trust he will never repeat.

During periods when the Drama and the stage have been almost at the last ebb, it should be recollected that Sheridan Knowles and Mr. Macready have continually exerted themselves to open new springs, or recal the retiring waters. If in vain, their indefatigable energies are at least worthy of admiration. Both have now been before the public these twenty-five or thirty years, and have well earned the estimation they have obtained. Mr. Knowles com

menced his career as an actor, but has some time since abandoned it. He is still in vigorous life, and full of excellent spirits poetical, convivial, and Hibernian. In private he is a prodigious favourite with all who know him; frank, burly, smiling, offhand, voluble, and saying whatever comes uppermost; with a large heart beating under a great broad and deep chest, not easily accessible to care or trouble, but constitutionally jovial and happy. Mr. Macready in private is good-natured, easy, unaffected, without the least attempt at display, extremely gentleman-like, habitually grave, and constitutionally saturnine. His smile is melancholy, and his expression is occasionally of great kindness. He speaks little; with frequent hesitation, but well: with good sense, and enlarged and benevolent sympathies, moral and political. His views of art are confused between the real and ideal. Mr. Knowles occasionally delivers Lectures on the Drama, which are conspicuous for no philosophy or art, and an abundance of good humour and the warmest admiration of his favourite authors.

MISS E. B. BARRETT

AND

MRS. NORTON.

'Flower of the Soul! emblem of sentient Thoughts,
With prayer on prayer to chorded harps ascending,
Till at the clouded Portals, humbly bending,
They, like the holy martyrs' pale cohorts,

Wait solemnly-while sounds of dew descending
Their presence recognize, approve, and bless ;-
Flower! shedding fragrance from a dark recess,
Thy roots lie passive on this mortal soil;

Thy beauty blooms on high-serene beyond our coil!"

"As one who drinks from a charmed cup

Of foaming and sparkling and murmuring wine,

Which a mighty Enchantress, filling up,

Invites to love with her lips divine."

"Thy Mind shines through thee like a radiant sun,

Although thy body be a beauteous cloud."

SHELLEY.

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.