At the foot of the notice there is a picture of a stout, shabby tragedian exclaiming "Fechter! Pah! Hamlet with light hair and no points. Pah! The drama's gone." This professional jealousy is again ridiculed in "The Groan of a True Briton" a month later. The "boom" in Shakespeare this winter was quite remarkable, with _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ at Sadler's Wells, Booth in _The Merchant of Venice_ and _King Richard II_, Brooke at Drury Lane, and Fechter at the Princess's. Othello's occupation (on the stage) was extremely popular. We read in the issue of November 9, under the heading "Great Fall of Blacks":-- Five Othellos are stabbing themselves regularly, just now, and there will soon be a sixth, Mr. Charles Kean having ordered the largest pot of blacking Messrs. Day and Martin supply, and having announced that he is cubbing dext. The vendetta against Charles Kean, it will thus be seen, was so implacable that _Punch_ could not resist the temptation of dragging him in without any provocation. Another and a greater foreigner dominated the scene in 1863. Of Adelaide Ristori, "the greatest of living actresses" in his opinion, _Punch_ confessed that her genius beggared description. When she appeared at Her Majesty's in the summer of 1863 he declared that "in no English or American dictionary could be found words of sufficient strength" to express his admiration of Adelaide Ristori, or "his compassion for the unhappy person who does not go and behold one or two of her performances. This is a debilitated under-statement of the case.... What a magnificent voice hers is, and how artistically managed. The _vox humana_ is the first musical instrument in the world, but then so few can perform upon it. Our Adelaide is one of the few." Here, at least, _Punch's_ estimate never varied, and was only heightened by further familiarity. When Ristori played Lady Macbeth in English ten years later, _Punch_ owned to some misgivings as to her accent,[28] but on the second performance he only noticed it twice. Otherwise "there was not, from first to last, one single fault to be found with this remarkable performance." [Footnote 28: The present writer saw and heard Ristori in the sleep-walking scene at Manchester in the early 'eighties, and her foreign accent was undoubtedly most pronounced. Her first words provoked laughter from the gallery, drowned immediately in a storm of cheering, renewed at the end of an impersonation so powerful and even terrifying that one entirely forgot the accent. The episode had an amusing sequel. An old theatre-goer wrote to a Manchester paper to express indignation at Ristori's reception by the gallery. The laughers could not be Manchester men: they must have been boors from Chowbent. A couple of days later a letter appeared from an equally indignant resident at Chowbent repelling the aspersion on a community so civilized that it possessed a Town Hall!] [Sidenote: _The Drama in Russia_]