Miss KELLY has indeed all the air of a heroine of honeyed romance.  In particular she played one episode, the trying over of a new song, in a winningly natural manner.  I found the way in which she flapped her eyelids a subject of puzzled study.  I have not observed that maidens in real life indulge in these calisthenics.  This is perhaps as well; they are evidently very deadly.  Within a fortnight of their being brought into action poet Quintard is in the Kamerad stage.  Not Anne Whitfield herself exhibits more explicitly the urgency of the life force, the will to wed.

Mr. OWEN NARES, who has a following more than sufficient to justify his recent assumption of management, gave a very attractive and indeed, within the limits imposed by the piece, a distinguished performance as the proud and hungry poet.  An extreme naturalness of pose and intonation, without over-stresses or affectations, characterised this agreeable study.  Mr. HOLMAN CLARK, that finished actor in the bland manner, very adroitly, as I have hinted, settled the mood of the piece and made the good appear the better line and the ordinary line good.  Mr. SYDNEY VALENTINE had a Valentine part ready made.  It would take more than an indisposition, which he pluckily ignored, to put him off his stroke.  Mr. TOM REYNOLDS was effective as a maudlin serving-man who had once butled a real gentleman and could never forget it.  Miss ANNIE ESMOND gave a depressingly clever rendering of a quite unbelievably appalling landlady.

[Illustration:  A Fairy Godmother (Miss RENEE KELLY) reduced to tears by the unsusceptibility of her Godchild (MR. OWEN NARES).]

Altogether a pleasant wholesome evening’s entertainment.  Young men and maidens of our day needn’t hesitate to take their parents.

“ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGONS.”

There is much more of the substance of wit and truth in Mr. EDEN PHILLPOTTS’ “Devon comedy” at the Kingsway.  The St. George of the title is not the Cappadocian, but that somewhat irreverent Father in God, St. George Loftus, Bishop of Exeter; the dragons are two quite unsuitable suitors for the hands of Monica and Eva (daughters of his dull old friend, Lord Sampford), who don’t believe in class distinctions. Monica’s young man is the son of a yeoman farmer, personable, certainly, on horseback and of a blood older than the Sampfords’, but an essential resilient, and altogether impossible when playing the concertina or after mixing his drinks (or both). Eva’s follower is a brilliant raw young man from Glasgow, recently ordained, with professional ambitions as pronounced as his accent.