London. The company at the Prince of Wales's
play with a finish, a sense of detail, what the French call an
_ensemble_, and a general good grace, which deserve explicit
recognition. The theatre is extremely small, elegant, and expensive,
the company is very carefully composed, and the scenery and stage
furniture lavishly complete. It is a point of honor with the Prince of
Wales's to have nothing that is not "real." In the piece now running at
this establishment there is a representation of a boudoir very
delicately appointed, the ceiling of which is formed by festoons of old
lace suspended tent fashion or pavilion fashion. This lace, I am told,
has been ascertained, whether by strong opera glasses or other modes of
inquiry I know not, to be genuine, ancient, and costly. This is the
very pedantry of perfection, and makes the scenery somewhat better than
the actors. If the tendency is logically followed out, we shall soon be
having Romeo drink real poison and Medea murder a fresh pair of babes
every night.

The Prince of Wales's theatre, when it has once carefully mounted a
play, "calculates," I believe, to keep it on the stage a year. The play
of the present year is an adaptation of one of Victorien Sardou's
cleverest comedies--"Nos Intimes"--upon which the title of "Peril" has
been conferred. Of the piece itself there is nothing to be said; it is
the usual hybrid drama of the contemporary English stage--a firm, neat
French skeleton, around which the drapery of English conversation has
been adjusted in awkward and inharmonious folds. The usual feat has been
attempted--to extirpate "impropriety" and at the same time to save
interest. In the extraordinary manipulation and readjustment of French
immoralities which goes on in the interest of Anglo-Saxon virtue, I have
never known this feat to succeed. Propriety may have been saved, in an
awkward, floundering, in-spite-of-herself fashion, which seems to do to
something in the mind a violence much greater than the violence it has
been sought to avert; but interest has certainly been lost. The only
immorality I know on the stage is the production of an ill-made play;
and a play is certainly ill made when the pointedness of the framework
strikes the spectator as a perpetual mockery upon the flatness of the
"developments." M. Sardou's perfectly improper but thoroughly
homogeneous comedy has been flattened and vulgarized in the usual way;
the pivot of naughtiness on which the piec