The Prince of Wales's theatre, when it has once carefully mounted a play, "calculates," I believe, to keep it on the stage a year. The play of the present year is an adaptation of one of Victorien Sardou's cleverest comedies--"Nos Intimes"--upon which the title of "Peril" has been conferred. Of the piece itself there is nothing to be said; it is the usual hybrid drama of the contemporary English stage--a firm, neat French skeleton, around which the drapery of English conversation has been adjusted in awkward and inharmonious folds. The usual feat has been attempted--to extirpate "impropriety" and at the same time to save interest. In the extraordinary manipulation and readjustment of French immoralities which goes on in the interest of Anglo-Saxon virtue, I have never known this feat to succeed. Propriety may have been saved, in an awkward, floundering, in-spite-of-herself fashion, which seems to do to something in the mind a violence much greater than the violence it has been sought to avert; but interest has certainly been lost. The only immorality I know on the stage is the production of an ill-made play; and a play is certainly ill made when the pointedness of the framework strikes the spectator as a perpetual mockery upon the flatness of the "developments." M. Sardou's perfectly improper but thoroughly homogeneous comedy has been flattened and vulgarized in the usual way; the pivot of naughtiness on which the piece turns has been "whittled" down to the requisite tenuity; the wicked little Jack-in-the-Box has popped up his head only just in time to pull it back again. The interest, from being intense, has become light, and the play, from being a serious comedy, with a flavor of the tragic, has become an elaborate farce, salted with a few coarse grains of gravity. It is probable, however, that if "Peril" were more serious, it would be much less adequately played.