In _Rip Van Winkle_ he plays a winning character. We have all of us a weakness for the amiable ne’er-do-well, who begins by ruining himself, and ends--much against his feeble inclination--by ruining his children and his friends. Our sympathy is wholly with him, and not with his irritated wife; and when he has drunk away his fortune, and all that he can of hers, we think that if he sits quietly under her reproaches, or makes but a gentle answer, he has atoned for everything. That is the magnetism of the lovable. And that is the kind of character that Mr. Jefferson embodies, in a manner so entirely natural that you are constantly forgetting that it is a performance. He has learned nothing by rote. He has an easy way of seeking for his words: a half-absorbed repetition of part of a phrase, as in our everyday, unchosen speech. He does not finish his sentence like an actor who has learned his lines and counted the delivery of them, and measured them to the end. The common actor winds up an address as Rossini and his school wind up a finale--‘I have the honour to remain your humble and obedient servant,’ Schumann said of them. But Mr. Jefferson’s sentences die off sometimes, or are changed a little, by a slight thing happening in his presence, or by the swift occurrence of a fresh thought which you may read in his face. It is the perfection of naturalness--the perfection of seeming spontaneity. And if his humour is as mild as Charles Lamb’s, his pathos is as gentle as Hans Christian Andersen’s. There is the delicate suggestion, for those who can seize it--the suggestion and nothing more. When Rip goes out from the home from which his wife has at last banished him--goes out pointing to the child, in answer to his wife’s reproach that he has no part in this house: ‘You say I have no part in this house’--the pathos is of a simple and suggested kind, comparable only to Hans Andersen’s, in the _Story of a Mother_. And as there is nothing in Literature like the one, there is little on the Stage like the other. (_Academy_, 6th November 1875.) ZOLA’S ‘THÉRÈSE RAQUIN’