It gives us infinite regret to be compelled, just as we put our foot upon the threshold of the critic's office, to animadvert upon some errors and defects in pronunciation, of which we could not have imagined the persons concerned to be capable. Our purpose is to persuade the people to encourage the stage upon principles honourable to it; not as a place of mere barren pastime; but as a school of improvement. But how shall we be able to bring the public mind to that habitual respect for the stage without which it must lose all useful effect, if the actors show themselves unfit for conveying instruction. Were this to be the case, and were mere pastime the object of theatres, Astley's horse-riders, the tumblers and rope-dancers of Sadlers-Wells, nay, the PUNCH of a puppet-show, would be as useful and respectable as Garrick, Barry, Cooke, or Kemble, and the circus might successfully batter its head against the walls of that building in Chesnut-street which the sculptor has enriched with the wooden proxies of Melpomene and Thalia. But criticism will not allow this. For the sake of the stage it will exert all its might to support the actors--and for the sake of the stage it will hold them in admonition. If the established principles of literature be violated by the actors, the very ground upon which the critic would support them, is blown up by a mine of their own construction, and not only they must sink, but the critic must, for the maintenance of a just cause, put his hand to their heads and give them a lanch. The theatre is a school for elocution or it is nothing. In Great Britain it has time immemorial been attended to, not as authority for innovations, but as an organ of conveyance of the authorised pronunciation, to which the growing youth of the country were to look for accurate information of what was correct, as settled and considered by their superiors, that is, by high learned men and statesmen. If the actors, therefore, run counter to authority, and thereby endanger the cause which they are presumed to aid, the mischief is too general and extensive in its operation to be neglected or endured. There is nothing belonging to the stage which demands such strict discipline as its orthoepy, because there is none in which it can so immediately and powerfully affect the public. On this point therefore we are determined to sacrifice nothing to ceremony; being convinced that debasing the language is essentially as injurious, though legally not so punishable, as defacing the current coin of a country.