was the direct result of a letter which she despatched to Petersburg denouncing a man who proved, in the light of fresh facts learned a few minutes later, to be the last (or last but one) that she would wish to injure.  It is incredible that she should not have hastened to send a second letter withdrawing her charge; “instead of which” she goes casually off on a honeymoon with his brother, and apparently never gives another thought to the matter till it is fatally too late.

However, I am not really concerned at this time of day with the improbabilities of so well-established a tragedy, but only with the most recent interpretation of it.  And let me say at once that, for the best of reasons, I do not propose to compete with the erudition of my fellow-critics in the matter of previous interpreters, for I bring a virgin mind to my consideration of the merits of the present cast.

Fedora is the most exhausting test to which Miss MARIE LOeHR has yet put her talent.  The heroine’s emotions are worked at top-pressure almost throughout the play.  At the very start she is torn with passionate grief for the death of her lover and a still more passionate desire to take vengeance on the man who killed him.  When she learns the unworthiness of the one and the justification of the other those emotions are instantly exchanged for a passionate worship of the late object of her vengeance, to be followed by bitter remorse for the harm she has done him and terror of the consequences when he comes to know the truth.  And so to suicide.

I will confess that I was astonished at the power with which Miss LOeHR met these exigent demands upon her emotional forces.  It was indeed a remarkable performance.  My only reservation is that in one passage she was too anxious to convey to the audience the intensity of her remorse, when it was a first necessity that she should conceal it from the other actor on the stage.  It was nice and loyal of Mr. BASIL RATHBONE to behave as if he didn’t notice anything unusual, but it must have been as patent to him as to us.

Of his Loris I cannot say too much in admiration.  At first Mr. RATHBONE seemed a little stiff in his admirably-fitting dress-clothes, but in the last scene he moved through those swift changes of emotion—­from joy to grief, from rage to pity and the final anguish and horror—­with extraordinary imagination and resource.

Of the others, Mr. ALLAN AYNESWORTH, as Jean de Siriex, played in a quiet and assured undertone that served to correct the rather expansive methods of Miss ELLIS JEFFREYS, whose humour, always delightful, afforded a little more relief than was perhaps consistent with the author’s designs and her own dignity as a great lady in the person of the Countess Olga.

O. S.

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A Matinee in aid of the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children will be given at the Garrick Theatre on Wednesday, November 17th, at 2.30, when a comedy by Mr. LOUIS N. PARKER will be presented, entitled, Pomander Walk (period 1805).