The comedy of Speed the Plough is deservedly reckoned among the best of the modern stock, and considered as reflecting great credit upon the muse of Mr. Morton. The plot is very skilfully mixed up, notwithstanding the difficulty that always must attend carrying on, in connection with each other, two interests of a totally distinct and opposite nature, connecting two contradictory agencies without either encroaching on the other, and conducting an alternation of serious and comic scenes to one end, without making them clash. This Mr. Morton has, to a considerable degree, successfully accomplished; making that which occasions the difficulty subservient to one of the most desirable but arduous ends in dramatic writing, that of concealing the final unravelling or denouement, as it is called, of the plot. A striking beauty in this play, and the more striking because seldom met with, is the fidelity with which some of the characters are drawn from life; not as it is found in a solitary individual, but as it appears in a whole numerous class. Such is farmer Ashfield--such is dame Ashfield. Yet the characters in general are not very impressive, and there are some inconsistencies in them as well as in the arrangement of the incidents. A young lady's suddenly, and at first sight, falling in love with a peasant boy, though it may have happened, is an occurrence too singular to be perfectly natural; and as a dramatic incident, it is a coarseness which cannot well be reconciled to the characteristic delicacy of such a young lady, even by the _ex post facto_ discovery that the object of her love was in reality a person of condition. We do not think that love at first sight, which is in reality nothing more than Forwardness indulging itself in the airs of Romance, and Prurience calling in Fate to sanction its indelicacy, ought to be clothed in such a respectable and captivating dress as our author has bestowed upon it in this play. Yet with these defects to counterbalance them, Speed the Plough is replete with beauties--the dialogue is neat, spirited, and forcible; and there are many delicate touches of the pathetic, and much excellent moral sentiment to recommend it.