Joseph Jefferson has been seen again--and with all the enthusiasm of many years ago--in _Rip Van Winkle_. The playbill which announces his appearance makes no mention of Washington Irving, but claims the play as ‘written by Dion Boucicault.’ It needs, however, no very profound student to detect in that tender and graceful fancy of the story, a quality not to be numbered among the useful talents of the versatile dramatist who can give us anything that lies between _London Assurance_ and the _Shaughraun_. But I believe that, after all these years, the work of three hands is really to be found in the play; Mr. Jefferson himself having manipulated much of its action and business. He does not act the piece: he lives in it. And he is only to be compared with Got, in Balzac’s _Mercadet_. Both performances are restrained and reserved, without the appearance of restraint and reserve. Both are quiet. There are no dramatic outbursts, and no surprises. But in each case a character, a career--one might almost say a life itself--is put before the spectator. Greater things have undoubtedly been done upon the stage--greater things have been done on the stage of our day by Irving, and greater remain to be done by him--but nothing quite so complete has been seen: nothing giving one the sense of so easy and unlaboured a mastery. The pathos is very gentle: the humour has something of Charles Lamb in it. Jefferson has a face of the utmost good-humour; very kindly eyes, gentle ways, which win upon the children and the dumb things of his village of Falling Waters. For it is certainly his village, this Falling Waters; we cannot seriously separate the actor from the man. And he has a voice of admirable quality and compass: an enunciation of the utmost distinctness, with no perceptible mannerism, unless, indeed, the studied quietness be itself a mannerism. The voice is capable of what would be called an almost womanly tenderness, by those who have never observed that the tenderness of a man--as here to children--may be even a profounder thing.