Edmund Kean’s loss has not been supplied as Mrs. Siddons’s was, to a certain extent, and to that actress’s great distaste, by Miss O’Neill; but Drury Lane has flourished with and by its Christmas pantomimes. Audiences cannot be what they were in Mr. Planché’s younger days. They examine no coin that is offered to them. They take what glitters as real currency, and are content. When we were told the other day of a player at the Gaiety representing Job Thornberry in a moustache, we asked if the pit did not shave him clean out of the comedy? Job Thornberry in a moustache! ‘Well,’ was the rejoinder, ‘he only follows suit. He imitates the example of Mr. Sothern, who played Garrick in a moustache.’ We were silent, and thought of the days when actors dressed their characters from portraits, as William Farren did his Frederick and his Charles XII. If Mr. Planché’s book had not been as suggestive as it is purely historical we should not have been so long coming to it. But he records a fact or makes a reflection, and straightway a reader, who has long memories of books or men, goes far back into older records in search of contrasts or of parallels. We come to him now definitely, and do not again mean to let him go, as far as his dramatic experiences are concerned. Mr. Planché makes even his birth _theatrical_; he says, ‘I believe I made my first appearance in Old Burlington Street on the 27th of February, 1796, about the time the farce begins’ (used to begin?) ‘at the Haymarket, that is, shortly after one o’clock in the morning.’ The Haymarket season, however, ran at that time only from June to September. In spite of ourselves, Mr. Planché’s record of his birth leads us to a subject that is, however, in connection with the record. We find that Mr. Planché was not only of the Kemble and Kean periods, since which time the stage has been ‘nothing’ especial, but that he was born under both. On the night of his birth John Kemble played Manly in ‘The Plain Dealer,’ with a cast further including Jack Bannister, the two Palmers, Dodd, Suett, and Mrs. Jordan! Think of the dolls and puppets and groups of sticks whom people are now asked to recognise as artists, and who gain more in a night than the greatest of the above-named players earned in a week. A few nights later Edmund Kean, if he himself is to be credited rather than theatrical biographers, made his first appearance on any stage as the ‘Robber’s Boy’ on the first night the ‘Iron Chest’ was acted--a play in which the boy was destined to surpass, in Sir Edward Mortimer, the original representative, John Kemble. At the other house little Knight, the father of the present secretary of the Royal Academy, made his _début_ in London; and the father of Mr. Macready was playing _utility_ with a finish that, if he were alive to do it now, would entitle him to a name on ‘posters’ three feet high, and to the sarcasm of managers, who readily pay comedians who ‘draw’ and laugh at _them_ and at the public