Mysterious are thy ways, O Yates!  Thou art the only true melodramatist of the stage and off the stage!  When a new demonology is compiled thou shalt have an honourable place in it.  Thou shall be worshipped as the demon of novelty, even by the “gods” themselves.  Thy deeds shall be recorded in history.  It shall not be forgotten that thou wert the importer of Mademoiselle Djeck, the tame elephant; of Monsieur Bohain, the gigantic Irishman; and of Signor Hervi o’Nano, the Cockneyan-Italian dwarf.  Never should we have seen the Bayaderes but for you; nor T.P.  Cooke in “The Pilot,” nor the Bedouin Arabs, nor “The Wreck Ashore,” nor “bathing and sporting” nymphs, nor other dramatic delicacies.  Truly, thou art the luckiest of managers; for all thy efforts succeed, whether they deserve it or not.  Sometimes thou drawest up an army of scene-painters, mechanists, dancers, monsters, dwarfs, devils, fire-works, and water-spouts, in terrible array against common sense.  Yet lo! thou dost conquer!  Thy pieces never miss fire; they go on well with the public, and favourable are the press reports.  Wert thou a Catholic thou wouldest be canonised; for evil spirits are thy passion; the Vatican itself cannot produce a more indefatigable “devils’ advocate!”

The repast now provided by Mr. Yates for those who are fond of “supping full of horrors” is a devilled drama, interspersed with hydraulics—­ consisting, in fact, of spirits and water, sweetened with songs and spiced with witches.  It is, we are informed by the official announcements, “a romantic burletta of witchcraft, in two acts, and a prologue, with entirely new scenery, dresses, and peculiar appointments, imagined by, and introduced under the direction of, Mr. Yates.”  Now, any person, entirely unprejudiced with a taste for devilry and free from hydrophobia, who sees this production, must have an unbounded opinion of the manager’s imagination,—­what a head he must have for aquatic effects!  In vain we look around for its parallel—­nothing but the New River head suggests itself.

But our preface is detaining us from the “prologue;” the first words in which stamp the entire production with originality.  Assassins, who let themselves out by the job, have long been pleasantly employed in melodramas, being mostly enacted by performers in the heavy line; but the author of “Die Hexen am Rhein” introduces a character hitherto unknown to the stage; namely, the comic cut-throat.  Messieurs Gabor and Wolfstein, (played by Mr. Wright, and the immortal Geoffery Muffincap, Mr. Wilkinson), treat us with a dialogue concerning the blowing out of brains, and the incision of weasands, which is conceived and delivered with the broadest humour, enlivened by the choicest of jokes.  They have, we learn, been lately commissioned by Ottocar to murder Rudolph, the exiled Duke of Hapsburgh, who is to pass that way; but he does not come, because his kind kinsman, Ottocar, must have time to