sual English actor
finds it impossible to utter with any degree of verisimilitude. Mr.
Hare's companion is Miss Ellen Terry, who is usually spoken of by the
"refined" portion of the public as the most interesting actress in
London. Miss Terry is picturesque; she looks like a pre-Raphaelitish
drawing in a magazine--the portrait of the crop-haired heroine in the
illustration to the serial novel. She is intelligent and vivacious, and
she is indeed, in a certain measure, interesting. With great frankness
and spontaneity, she is at the same time singularly delicate and
lady-like, and it seems almost impertinent to criticise her harshly. But
the favor which Miss Terry enjoys strikes me, like that under which Mr.
Henry Irving has expanded, as a sort of measure of the English critical
sense in things theatrical. Miss Terry has all the pleasing qualities I
have enumerated, but she has, with them, the defect that she is simply
_not_ an actress. One sees it sufficiently in her face--the face of
a clever young Englishwoman, with a hundred merits, but not of a
dramatic artist. These things are indefinable; I can only give my
impression.

Broadly comic acting, in England, is businesslike, and high tragedy is
businesslike; each of these extremes appears to constitute a trade--a
_metier_, as the French say--which may be properly and adequately
learned. But the acting which covers the middle ground, the acting of
serious or sentimental comedy and of scenes that may take place in
modern drawing-rooms--the acting that corresponds to the contemporary
novel of manners--seems by an inexorable necessity given over to
amateurishness. Most of the actors at the Prince of Wales's--the young
lovers, the walking and talking gentlemen, the housekeeper and young
ladies--struck me as essentially amateurish, and this is the impression
produced by Miss Ellen Terry, as well as (in an even higher degree) by
her pretty and sweet-voiced sister, who plays at the Haymarket. The art
of these young ladies is awkward and experimental; their very speech
lacks smoothness and firmness.

I am not sorry to be relieved, by having reached the limits of my space,
from the necessity of expatiating upon one of the more recent theatrical
events in London--the presentation, at the St. James's theatre, of an
English version of "Les Danicheff." This extremely picturesque and
effective play was the great Parisian success of last winter, and during
the London season the compa