If it were a simple question of bulk, few authors would lend themselves to the process of compression so well as CHARLES DICKENS; but the scheme of _David Copperfield_ is too complex, and its interests too many and competitive, to be packed into a three-hours' play, even by Mr. LOUIS PARKER, master of the tabloid. Of the main themes--the career of the hero himself, the machinations of _Uriah Heep_, the tragedy of _Little Em'ly_--only the last was at all effective in pillule form. The figure of _David Copperfield_--always pleasant if rather colourless--served to hold the play together; but the central experience of his life was treated with the extreme of haziness. We were informed of his engagement to _Dora_, his marriage, her illness, her death, all with the brevity of a French official _communiqué_; but as for the child-wife herself we never so much as set eyes on her. While again we gathered that the designs of _Uriah Heep_ were ultimately confounded, nobody without the aid of memory or imagination could possibly have penetrated their obscurity. On the other hand--whether with or without the connivance of Sir HERBERT TREE I dare not conjecture--the person of _Wilkins Micawber_ was given a prominence out of all proportion to his share in any one of the plots. Unlike the something that was to make his fortune, he was always "turning up," and, whenever he did, he practically had the stage to himself. I am far from quarrelling with this arrangement, for I have never seen Sir HERBERT in better form. His humour was of the richest, yet full of quiet subtleties, and merely to gaze upon his grotesque figure was a pure delight. That he should have permitted himself, in a spirit of creative irresponsibility, to deviate at times into the borderland of farce, and become an hilarious blend of himself and Mr. HENRY JAMES (I don't know why he suggested to me a burlesque of Mr. HENRY JAMES, for I have never known that most distinguished of writers to lapse from decorum) need not trouble anybody in a play where there was no pretence of insisting upon the letter of DICKENS. The transition from _Falstaff_ to _Micawber_, from a bibber of sack to a bibber of punch, was an easy one for Sir HERBERT; but not so easy were the constant changes from and into the part of _Dan'l Peggotty_. Here he gave us a really admirable character-sketch--for _Peggotty_ belongs to the region of possibility, whereas _Micawber_ is always a creature of incredible fancy--and I am not sure that his achievement as the old salt was not, for him, the greater of the two. Certainly in the scene where he tells of his search over the world for _Little Em'ly_ he came nearer to simple pathos than I have ever known him to come. Even the strong Somerset accent of this East Anglian tar could not conceal his sincerity.