Beneath Italian skies girls spring with sudden leap to womanhood, and the seed of the tender passion hardly drops into the heart before it buds and blooms, a perfect flower. Though the actual lapse of time represented in the play occupies only a few days, Juliet in that brief period must assume several distinct characters. We see her first the coy, heart-whole maiden, the cherished heiress of a patrician house: soon the blind bow-boy launches his shaft, and, quick as thought, she is passionately, impulsively, enduringly in love; then we see her but a few hours a bride, with black sorrow creeping already to darken her happiness; her kinsman is slain, Romeo banished, and the coy maiden is changed at once to the devoted wife, capable of any sacrifice that will enable her to rejoin her husband, then follow the fearful drinking of the philter, the miscarriage of the Friar's scheme, and the death of the lovers, who seek in the grave that union denied them on earth. What varied qualities and acts are clustered here!--simplicity, love, hope, fear, courage, despair, suicide. In the whole range of Shakespeare's female characters there is none so difficult to portray--none requiring such a combination of beauty and talent; and we need not marvel that the part of Juliet is rarely attempted, and still more rarely with success. That Miss Neilson was successful during her recent short engagement at the Walnut Street Theatre may be inferred, not alone from the great audiences that thronged the theatre night after night--for people will often throng to see a very unworthy performance--but from the intellectual character of those audiences, and the manifest pleasure they derived from seeing the fair English actress. In every criticism it should be borne in mind that she played under great disadvantage. She was unfortunately, with some few exceptions, very badly supported. It seems ungracious, therefore, to search for any flaw in the performance of such an admirable actress, who has left behind her so many charming memories; yet it must be admitted that her acting is not always as faultless as her face. In her Juliet there are striking inequalities perceptible: sometimes she seems to have just grasped perfection, then again she makes one wonder that she does no better. In portraying love-scenes she is unsurpassed: she is graceful and beautiful, has studied her parts thoroughly, has a sweet, penetrating voice, and seems herself to feel the sentiments she would convey to others. Her enunciation is remarkably distinct, and she has the power of mingling more or less pathos with the tones to express sorrow in greater or less degree: in one scene, where she thinks that Romeo has been murdered, her cheeks are wet with actual tears. At the close of the ball, when she learns that the fascinating young pilgrim is a Montague, the hereditary enemy of her house, she gives her first touch of pathos to the words--