In the same year that the Holborn Amphitheatre was opened, Astley’s was re-opened as a circus by Mr Friend. The chief attraction upon which Mr Friend relied was the impersonation of Mazeppa by Adah Isaacs Menken, a young lady of Jewish extraction, who came from America with the reputation of a female Crichton of the nineteenth century. According to a biographical sketch prefixed to a Paris version of the drama, _The Pirate of the Savannah_, in which she appeared in that city, she had written verses and essays at an age at which other girls are occupied with dolls, and translated the _Iliad_ in her thirteenth year. In Latin and Hebrew, Spanish and German, she was as proficient as in Greek; French, her enthusiastic Gallic biographer does not seem to consider it necessary to mention. Her mother being left in reduced circumstances at her second widowhood, Adah resolved to devote her natural talents and acquired accomplishments to the stage, and made her appearance as a dancer at the opera-house at New Orleans, of which city she was a native. After achieving the greatest artistic triumphs there and at Havanna, she abandoned the boards for the literary profession, publishing a volume of poems, and contributing for some time to two New Orleans journals. In 1858, being then seventeen years of age, she made her _début_ as an actress in her native city, and subsequently performed in the chief towns of the West. In 1863 she went to San Francisco, and afterwards made a professional tour of the Eastern States, raising her reputation, according to her biographer, to the highest pitch. Unfortunately for the maintenance of the exalted fame which she brought from the United States, this versatile lady appeared, not at the Italian Opera as a dancer, nor at Drury Lane or Covent Garden as an actress, which such fame should have entitled her to do, but at Astley’s in the character of Mazeppa; and it was still more unfortunate that the management pinned their faith in her powers of attraction, not upon her talent as an actress, but upon her beauty and grace, and her ability to play the part without recourse to a double for the fencing and riding. Enormous posters everywhere met the eye, representing the lady, apparently in a nude state, stretched on the back of a wild horse, and inviting the public to go to Astley’s, and see ‘the beautiful Menken.’ Young men thronged the theatre to witness this combination of _poses plastiques_ with dramatic spectacle, and ‘girls of the period’ dressed their hair _à la Menken_, that is, like the frizzled crop of a negress; but the theatrical critics looked coldly and sadly upon the performance, and accused the management of ministering to a vitiated taste.