The acting was also good, but too extravagantly so.  Mr. Wright, as Titmouse, thought perhaps that a Cockney dandy could not be caricatured, and he consequently went desperate lengths, but threw in here and there a touch of nature.  Mr. Lyon was as energetic as ever in Gammon; Mrs. Yates as lugubrious as is her wont in Miss Aubrey; Mrs. Grattan acted and looked as if she were quite deserving of a man with ten thousand a year.  As to her singing, if her husband were in possession of twenty thousand per annum, (would to the gods he were!) it could not have been more charmingly tasteful.  The pathetics of Wilkinson (as Quirk) in the suicide scene, and just before the event, deserve the attention and imitation of Macready.  We hope the former comedian’s next character will be Ion, or, at least, Othello.  He has now proved that smaller parts are beneath his purely histrionic talents.

Mr. Yates did not make a speech!  This extraordinary omission set the house in a buzz of conjectural wonderment till “The Maid of Honour” put a stop to it.

NOTE.—­A critique on this piece would have appeared last week, if it had pleased some of the people at the post-office (through which the MS. was sent to the Editors) not to steal it.  Perhaps they took it for something valuable; and, perhaps, they were not mistaken.  Thanks be to Mercury, we have plenty of wit to spare, and can afford some of it to be stolen now and then.  Still we entreat Colonel Maberly (Editor of the “Post” in St. Martin’s-le-Grand) to supply his clerks with jokes enough to keep them alive, that they may not be driven to steal other people’s.  The most effectual way to preserve them in a state of jocular honesty would be for him to present every person on the establishment with a copy of “Punch” from week to week.

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