During one of the intervals which served so well to eke out the brief two hours of Mr. VACHELL's new "comedy," and were quite as good as many things in the play, I allowed my mind--an absolute blank--to dwell upon certain arresting features in the stage curtain of the St. James's Theatre. In the centre, imposed upon a design whose significance I do not pretend to penetrate, is a gigantic wreath encircling a monogram of the magic initials, G. A., which are surmounted by something which I took to be an heraldic top-hat. This headpiece is in turn surmounted by an heraldic eagle--the ordinary arrangement by which the helmet appears above the coat-of-arms being thus reversed. The central design is flanked on each side by two other wreaths, massive but subordinate. Within the sinister wreath is enshrined in Greek capitals the letters ALEX, and within the dexter wreath the letters ANDROS. "Reading from left to right" we have here the historic name of the Macedonian monarch. I cannot account for the Greek form of the name on the ground that the St. James's Theatre is the home of the Classical Drama, for the themes of its plays seldom go back beyond the later decades of the 19th century A.D., and I can only conclude that it is meant to indicate that the conquests of Sir GEORGE ALEXANDER'S company resemble those of the famous phalanx of his namesake, the Great. Most theatres have an atmosphere of their own, and it would be hard to recall any play at the St. James's that has been less in keeping with the local climate than this comedy, so described, of Mr. VACHELL'S. On the score of impropriety and improbability it might in the old days have appealed to the Criterion management; but its lack of broad humour must have negatived these advantages. In any case Sir GEORGE ALEXANDER'S house was no place for a farce so out of harmony with Macedonian methods. Almost its solitary interest lay in the doubt, maintained to the last moment, as to which of its many fatuous males would turn out to be the hero--meaning by hero the chosen husband of the heroine, for none of them had any personal claim to the title. Indeed, the choice ultimately fell upon the one that had the least distinctive personality of all, his disguise being kept up by a kind of protective colourlessness. But for Miss ELLIS JEFFREYS, who played the aunt of the preposterous _Lady Pen_ with a courage worthy of a better cause, and extracted from the play such humour as it held for her, matters would have gone badly for those of us who have been accustomed to look to Mr. VACHELL for entertainment. Mr. ALLAN AYNESWORTH, as the heroine's guardian, had no difficulty in transmitting pleasantly enough his mild share of the fun. Miss MARIE HEMINGWAY needed all her prettiness to make up for the futility of her part. And I was really sorry that so sound an actor as Mr. DAWSON MILWARD should have had such ineffective stuff put into his mouth.