Turn Out! There are in the English language no two words which act so forcibly in exciting sympathy and compassion. There is in them a melancholy cadence, beautifully corresponding with the sadness of the idea which they express: they awaken in a moment the tenderest recollections and the most anxious forebodings: there is in them a talismanic charm which influences alike all ages and all dispositions; the Church, the Bar, and the Senate are all comprised in the range of its operation: indeed, we believe that in no profession, in no rank of life, we shall find the man who can meditate, without an inward feeling of mental depression, on the simple, the unstudied, the unaffected pathos of the words “Turn out.” Is it not extraordinary, that when the idea is in itself so tragic, and gives birth to such sombre sensations, Melpomene should have altogether neglected the illustration of it? Is it not still more extraordinary that her sportive sister Thalia should have dared indecorously to jest with a subject so entirely unsuited to her pen? To take our meaning from its veil of metaphor, is it not extraordinary that Mr. Kenney should have written a farce on the words “Turn Out?” We regard Mr. Kenney’s farce as a sacrilege, a profanation, a burlesque of the best feelings of our nature; and in spite of the ingenuity of the writer, and the talents of the performers, humanity and its attendant prejudices revolt in disgust from the scene which endeavours to raise a laugh by a parody of so melancholy a topic. It is not difficult to account for the pensive feelings which are excited by these words: they recall forcibly to our mind the uncertainty of all human concerns; they bid us think on the sad truth, that from power, from affluence, from happiness, we may be “turned out” at a minute’s warning; they whisper to us that the lease of life is held on a precarious tenure, subject to the will of a Providence which we can neither control nor foresee; they oblige us to look forward to that undiscovered country, from whose dark limits we would fain avert our eyes; they convince us of the truth of the desponding expression of the Psalmist, “Man is but a thing of nought, his time passeth away like a shadow.”