Gay’s ‘What-d’ye-call-it,’ is not one of his happiest things. His ‘Polly’ is a complete failure, which, indeed, is the common fate of second parts. If the original Polly, in the Beggar’s Opera, had not had more winning ways with her, she would hardly have had so many Countesses for representatives as she has had, from her first appearance up to the present moment. Fielding was a comic writer, as well as a novelist; but his comedies are very inferior to his novels: they are particularly deficient both in plot and character. The only excellence which they have is that of the style, which is the only thing in which his novels are deficient. The only dramatic pieces of Fielding that retain possession of the stage are, the Mock Doctor (a tolerable translation from Moliere’s _Médecin malgré lui_), and his Tom Thumb, a very admirable piece of burlesque. The absurdities and bathos of some of our celebrated tragic writers could hardly be credited, but for the notes at the bottom of this preposterous medley of bombast, containing his authorities and the parallel passages. Dryden, Lee, and Shadwell, make no very shining figure there. Mr. Liston makes a better figure in the text. His Lord Grizzle is prodigious. What a name, and what a person! It has been said of this ingenious actor, that ‘he is very great in Liston;’ but he is even greater in Lord Grizzle. What a wig is that he wears! How flighty, flaunting, and fantastical! Not ‘like those hanging locks of young Apollo,’ nor like the serpent-hair of the Furies of Æschylus; but as troublous, though not as tragical as the one—as imposing, though less classical than the other. ‘_Que terribles sont ces cheveux gris_,’ might be applied to Lord Grizzle’s most valiant and magnanimous curls. This sapient courtier’s ‘fell of hair does at a dismal treatise rouse and stir as if life were in’t.’ His wits seem flying away with the disorder of his flowing locks, and to sit as loosely on our hero’s head as the caul of his peruke. What a significant vacancy in his open eyes and mouth! what a listlessness in his limbs! what an abstraction of all thought or purpose! With what an headlong impulse of enthusiasm he throws himself across the stage when he is going to be married, crying, ‘Hey for Doctor’s Commons,’ as if the genius of folly had taken whole-length possession of his person! And then his dancing is equal to the discovery of a sixth sense—which is certainly very different from _common sense_! If this extraordinary personage cuts a great figure in his life, he is no less wonderful in his death and burial. ‘From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step;’ and this character would almost seem to prove, that there is but one step from the ridiculous to the sublime.—Lubin Log, however inimitable in itself, is itself an imitation of something existing elsewhere; but the Lord Grizzle of this truly original actor, is a pure invention of his own.