[Illustration:  A BREAKDOWN AT THE LYCEUM!

(Imported from the Gaiety.)]

A few evenings later I had a second time the advantage of being present at a first night’s performance.  The occasion was, the production of The Great Unknown, by AUGUSTIN DALY’s Company of Comedians.  I found the piece described as a “new eccentric Comedy,” but, beyond a certain oddness in the distribution of the characters of the cast, did not notice much novelty or eccentricity.  The life and soul of the evening’s entertainment was Miss ADA REHAN, a talented lady, who (so I was told) has made her mark in Rosalind, in As You Like It, and Katharina, in the Taming of the Shrew. I can quite believe that Miss REHAN is a great success in parts of the calibre of the Shakspearian heroines I have mentioned; nay, more, I fancy she would do something with Lady Macbeth, and be quite in her element as Emilia, in Othello.  But, as she had to play an ingenue, aged eighteen, in The Great Unknown, she was not quite convincing.  It was a very good part.  In the First Act she had to coax her papa, and flirt with her cousin; in the second, to respond to a declaration of love with a burst of womanly feeling; and, in the third, to play the hoyden, and dance a breakdown.  All this was done to perfection, but not by a young lady of eighteen.  Miss ADA REHAN was charming, but looked, and I fancy felt, many years older than her legal majority.  I question whether she was an ingenue at all, but, if she were, she was an ingenue of great and varied experience.  When Mrs. BANCROFT appeared as the girl-pupil in School, she was the character to the life; but when Miss REHAN calls herself Etna, throws herself on sofas, and hugs a man with less inches than herself, we cannot but feel that it is very superior play-acting, but still play-acting.  Take it all round, I was delighted with the lady at the Lyceum, and the horse at the Adelphi, and nearly regret that, having to leave town, I shall not have the opportunity of seeing either of them again.

Yours faithfully.  A CRITIC FROM THE COUNTRY.

* * * * *

A HOLIDAY APPEAL.

[Last year Mrs. JEUNE’S “Country Holiday Fund” was the means of sending 1,075 poor, sickly, London children for a few weeks into the country, averting many illnesses saving many lives, and imparting incalculable happiness.  Mrs. JEUNE makes appeal for pecuniary assistance to enable her to continue this unquestionably excellent work.]

  It is Holiday Time, and all such as can pay,
  For the Summer-green country are up and away;
  But what of the poor pale-faced waifs of the slums? 
  Oh, the butterfly flits, and the honey-bee hums
  O’er the holt and the heather, the hill and the plain,
  But they flit and they hum for Town’s children in vain;