ontempt.

This is a point to which it is the manager's duty to attend, because it
is not a matter of doubt, nor subject to discretionary opinion. What
must that part of our youth who attend to these things from a laudable
desire for improvement, think, when they hear the same word differently
pronounced in the same scene by different actors. Upon one night
particularly, Mr. M'Kenzie several times returned the mispronounced
word, pronounced as it should be, with an emphasis which could not be
misunderstood: yet the mispronunciation was persisted in.

Before we drop this subject we must observe that the pronunciation of
the last syllable of the word sacrifice is sometimes as erroneously
pronounced as the first, indeed worse, as the sound given to it
approximates to one which conveys an offensive idea. Properly pronounced
it rhymes to the verbs _advise_, _rise_, and not to mice, spice, &c.

Having brought our critical journal up to the appearance of that
phenomenon of the stage of this new world, Master Payne, we find
ourselves constrained, by the limits of this number, to postpone our
observations upon the plays in which that extraordinary boy, for so many
nights, astonished and delighted crowded houses, and far beyond our
expectations, made good his title to the partiality of every city in
which he has performed.

CRITICISM.

THE FOUNDLING OF THE FOREST--A PLAY.

This production which we have annexed to our first number, not on
account of its superior merit, but because it was the most recently
published of any that has yet come to our hands, will, on the most
superficial reading, be discerned to be of the true German cast. The old
trick of grouping the characters at the end of a scene, and dropping the
curtain upon them, by way of leaving it to the general conception of the
audience to guess the rest, as is done in the Stranger, and all others
of that breed, is here twice put in practice. Those who like such drugs
mixed up with a _quantum sufficit_ of horror, and all the tenterhook
interest, hair-breadth escapes, and incident so forced as to stagger
belief, which make up the hotchpotch romances whether narrative or
dramatic of the present day, will like this. Mr. Dimond has in this
piece certainly shown great skill in working up that kind of materials
to the production of stage effect; since to those who can be interested
or affected by the marvellous and mysterious, and who love to step for
amusement o