As an amusing specimen of vindictive criticism, we subjoin a notice in the Washington Capitol, under date May 28, 1876.  This lengthy notice contains strong internal evidence of a deadly feud existing between Manager Ford and the editor of the Capitol, and the stab is given through the fair bosom of Mary Anderson, whose immense success in Senatorial Washington, this atrabilious knight of the plume devotes two columns of his valuable space to explaining away.

Washington City Daily Capitol, 28th May, 1876.

“Miss Anderson comes to us on a perfect whirlwind of newspaper puffs.  We use the words advisedly, for in none of them can be found a paragraph of criticism.  If Siddons or Cushman had been materialized and restored to the stage in all their pristine excellence, the excitement in Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis and New Orleans, could not have been more intense.  The very firemen of one of those cities seem to have been aroused and lost their hearts, if not their heads; and not only serenaded the object of their adoration, but got up a decoration for her to wear of the most costly and gorgeous sort.  Under this state of facts we waited with unusual impatience for sixteen sticks to give the cue that was to fetch on the Juliet.  It came at last, and Juliet stalked in.  Had Lady Macbeth responded to the summons we could not have been more amazed.  Miss Anderson is heroic in size and manner.  The lovely heiress to the house of the Capulets, on the turn of sixteen, swept in upon the stage as if she were mistress of the house, situation, and of fate, and bent on bringing the enemy to terms.  Her face is sweet, at times positively beautiful, but incapable of expression.  Her voice, while clear, is hard, metallic, at intervals nasal, and all the while stagey.  She has been trained in the old Kemble tragic pump-handle style of elocution, that runs talk on stilts.  Her manner is crude and awkward.  In the balcony scene she only needed a pair of gold rimmed glasses to have made her an excellent schoolmistress, chiding a naughty young man for intruding upon the sacred premises of Madame Fevialli’s select academy for young ladies.  In the love scenes that followed she was cold enough to be broken to pieces for a refrigerator.  But who could have warmed up to such a Romeo?  That unpleasant youth pained us with his quite unnecessary gyrations and spasmodic noise.  We soon discovered that Miss Anderson had been coached for Juliet without possessing on her part the most distant conception of the character—­or capacity to render it, had she the information.  She was not doing Juliet from end to end.  She was as far from Juliet as the North Pole is from the Equator.  She was doing something else.  We could not make out clearly what that character was; but it was something quite different and a good way off.  Sometimes we thought it was Lady Macbeth, sometimes Meg Merrilies, sometimes Lucretia Borgia, but never for a moment Juliet.