There is a great deal of affectation of gentility, and a great deal of real indecorum, in the comic dialogue of this play. The tragic part is violent and vulgar in the extreme. Mr. Young is brought forward as a downright common madman, just broke loose from a madhouse at Richmond, and is going with a club to dash out the brains of his daughter, Miss Foote, and her infant. This infant is no other than a large wooden doll: it fell on the floor the other evening without receiving any hurt, at which the audience laughed. This dreadful interlude is taken, we suppose, from Mrs. Opie’s tale of Father and Daughter, of which we thought never to have heard or seen any thing more. As the whole of this part is conceived without the smallest poetical feeling, so Mr. Young did not contrive to throw one ray of genius over it. Miss Foote behaved throughout very prettily, dutifully and penitently; and in the last scene, where, to bring back her father’s senses, she is made to stand in a frame and to represent her own portrait playing on the harp, she looked a perfect picture. GEORGE BARNWELL _The Examiner._ _December 31, 1815._ George Barnwell has been acted as usual at both Theatres during the Christmas week. Whether this is ‘a custom more honoured in the breach or the observance,’ we shall not undertake to decide. But there is one error on this subject which we wish to correct; which is, that its defects arise from its being too natural. It is one of the most improbable and purely arbitrary fictions we have ever seen. Lillo is by some people considered as a kind of natural Shakespear, and Shakespear as a poetical Lillo. We look upon Shakespear to have been a greater man than the Ordinary of Newgate; and we at the same time conceive that there is not any one of the stories in the Newgate Calendar so badly told as this tragedy of Lillo’s. Lillo seems to have proceeded on the old Scotch proverb, ‘The kirk is gude, and the gallows is gude.’