photographic pictures which will flood the town.  Unquestionably Miss Anderson never looked so well as a statue, both lifeless and animated, never comported herself with such grace, never gave such a perfect embodiment of purity and innocence.  In marble she was a statue motionless; in life she was a statue half warmed.  There are those who believe, or who try to persuade themselves, that this is all Galatea has to do—­to appear behind a curtain as a ‘pose plastique,’ to make an excellent ’tableau vivant,’ and to wear Greek drapery, as if she had stepped down from a niche in the Acropolis.  All this Miss Mary Anderson does to perfection.  She is a living, breathing statue.  A more beautiful object in its innocent severity the stage has seldom seen.  But is this all that Galatea has to do?  Those who have studied Mr. Gilbert’s poem will scarcely say so.  Galatea descended from her pedestal has to become human, and has to reconcile her audience to the contradictory position of a woman, who, presumably innocent of the world and its ways, is unconsciously cynical and exquisitely pathetic.  We grant that it is a most difficult part to play.  Only an artist can give effect to the comedy, or touch the true chord of sentiment that underlies the idea of Galatea.  But to make Galatea consistently inhuman, persistently frigid, and monotonously spiritual, is, if not absolutely incorrect, at least glaringly ineffective.  If Galatea does not become a breathing, living woman when she descends from her pedestal, a woman capable of love, a woman with a foreshadowing of passion, a woman of tears and tenderness, then the play goes for nothing....  Miss Anderson reads Galatea in a severe fashion.  She is a Galatea perfectly formed, whose heart has not yet been adjusted.  She shrinks from humanity.  She wants to be classical and severe, and her last cry to Pygmalion, instead of being the utterance of a tortured soul, is ‘monotonous and hollow as a ghost’s.’  It is with no desire to be discourteous that we venture any comparison between the Galatea of Miss Anderson and of Mrs. Kendal.  The comparison should only be made on the point of reading.  Yet surely there can be no doubt that Mrs. Kendal’s idea of Galatea, while appealing to the heart, is more dramatically effective.  It illumines the poem.”

The Times, 28th January, 1884.

“LYCEUM THEATER.

“Those who have suspected that Miss Mary Anderson was well advised in clinging to the artificial class of character hitherto associated with her engagement at the Lyceum—­characters, that is to say, making little call upon the emotional faculties of their exponent—­will not be disposed to modify their opinion from her ‘creation’ of the new part of distinctly higher scope in Mr. Gilbert’s one act drama, ‘Comedy and Tragedy,’ produced for the first time on Saturday night.  Though passing in a single scene, this piece furnishes a more crucial test of Miss Anderson’s powers than any of her previous assumptions in this country.