e turns has been "whittled"
down to the requisite tenuity; the wicked little Jack-in-the-Box has
popped up his head only just in time to pull it back again. The
interest, from being intense, has become light, and the play, from being
a serious comedy, with a flavor of the tragic, has become an elaborate
farce, salted with a few coarse grains of gravity. It is probable,
however, that if "Peril" were more serious, it would be much less
adequately played.

The Prince of Wales's company contains in the person of Miss Madge
Robertson (or Mrs. Kendal, as I believe she is nowadays called) the most
agreeable actress on the London stage. This lady is always pleasing, and
often charming; but she is more effective in gentle gayety than in
melancholy or in passion. Another actor at the Prince of Wales's--Mr.
Arthur Cecil--strikes me as an altogether superior comedian. He plays in
"Peril" (though I believe he is a young man) the part of a selfish,
cantankerous, querulous, jaundiced old East Indian officer, who has come
down to a country house to stay, under protest, accompanied by his only
son, a stripling in roundabouts, whom he is bringing up in ignorance of
the world's wickedness, and who, finding himself in a mansion well
supplied with those books which no gentleman's library should be
without, loses no time in taking down Bocaccio's "Decameron." Mr. Arthur
Cecil represents this character to the life, with a completeness, an
extreme comicality, and at the same time a sobriety and absence of
violence which recalls the best French acting. Especially inimitable is
the tone with which he tells his host, on his arrival, how he made up
his mind to accept his invitation: "So at last I said to Percy, 'Well,
Percy, my child, we'll go down and have done with it!'"

At the Court theatre, where they are playing, also apparently by the
year, a "revived" drama of Mr. Tom Taylor--"New Men and Old Acres"--the
acting, though very good indeed, struck me as less finished and, as a
whole, less artistic. The company contains, however, two exceptionally
good actors. One of them is Mr. Hare, who leads it, and who, although
nature has endowed him with an almost fatally meagre stage presence, has
a considerable claim to be called an artist. Mr. Hare's special line is
the quiet natural, in high life, and I imagine he prides himself upon
the propriety and good taste with which he acquits himself of those
ordinary phrases and light modulations which the u