I have a mind that moves slowly and I hate to be hustled at the opening of a play. I hate an author to plunge me into a whirl of movement and a medley of characters as if he assumed that I was intimate with circumstances known only to himself and his cast. I want to be told, very quietly, where I am, and if he does not tell me I become peevish. But, even if I hadn't been put off at the start, I don't think my sympathies would ever have been very deeply engaged. I soon saw that, whatever happened to anybody, I should easily bear up. Mr. LOUIS CALVERT did all that was humanly possible to correct my indifference, but his _Daddalums_ (as you might gather from such a name) was not one of those heroic figures whose struggles against the perversity of fate are apt to melt even the cold hearts of the gods (Olympian). This old cobbler, suddenly grown rich, whose one ambition was to make his son "_Tammas_" a gentleman (as he understood the term), at any cost to the boy's soul, was asking for trouble from the beginning. And when he got it I was far less sorry for the old fool than I was pleased at the chances which this turn of fortune gave to the versatility of Mr. CALVERT. But the interest of the play lies not so much in the plot--worked out mechanically, with one or two saving touches of ingenuity, to a conventional conclusion--as in the character of this lovable old boot-maker, whose single aim in life was to give his son the best that money could buy. His heart, I think, began by being fairly large, but got contracted through specialising in this passion. Snobbery is alien to his nature, but he becomes a snob for _Tammas's_ sake. Stubborn and domineering with others, he is as putty in the boy's hands. He has no use for his other child--a girl. She, like himself, must be sacrificed if it suits the young gentleman--as it did. I won't say that any very nice psychological subtlety was needed for the portrayal of a character whose ruling motive was so clearly advertised, but it had its lights and shadows, responsive to changing conditions, and Mr. CALVERT was quick to seize them all. The boy's part was too unsympathetic to be played easily. But he had one saving virtue; he never practised his snobbery on the old man who encouraged it. He still called him "Daddalums," and that, I take it, was what the papers would call an "acid test" of his piety. As his fortunes declined Mr. LISTER rose to the occasion. The tighter the corner the better he coped with it.