IV.--ISAAC BICKERSTAFF'S "HYPOCRITE" (1819) By one of those strange perversities which actuate poor mortals in the place of motives (to persuade us into the notion that we are free agents, we presume), we had never till the other evening seen DOWTON in _Doctor Cantwell_. By a pious fraud of Mr. ARNOLD'S, who, by a process as simple as some of those by which MATHEWS metamorphoses his person, has converted the play into an opera,--a conversion, by the way, for which we are highly indebted to him,--we have been favoured with this rich novelty at our favourite theatre. It seems a little unreasonable to come lagging in with a posthumous testimony to the merits of a performance of which the town has long rung, but we cannot help remarking in Mr. DOWTON'S acting, the subtil _gradations_ of the hypocrisy; the length to which it runs in proportion as the recipient is capable of taking it in; the gross palpable way in which he adminsters the dose in wholesale to old _Lady Lambert_, that rich fanatic; the somewhat more guarded manner in which he retails it out, only so much at a time as he can bear, to the somewhat less bitten fool her son; and the almost absence of it, before the younger members of the family, when nobody else is by: how the cloven foot peeps out a little and a little more, till the diabolical nature is stung out at last into full manifestation of its horrid self. What a grand insolence in the tone which he assumes, when he commands _Sir John_ to quit _his_ house! and then the tortures and agonies when he is finally baffled! It is in these last perhaps that he is greatest, and we should be doing injustice not to compare this part of the performance with, and in some respects to give it the preference above, the acting of Mr. KEAN in a situation nearly analogous, at the conclusion of the _City Madam_. _Cantwell_ reveals his pangs with quite as much force, and without the assistance of those contortions which transform the detected _Luke_ into the similitude of a mad tiger, or a foaming demon. DOWTON plays it neither like beast nor demon, but simply as it should be, a bold bad man pushed to extremity. Humanity is never once overstepped. Has it ever been noticed, the exquisite modulation with which he drawls out the word CHARLES, when he calls his secretary, so humble, so seraphic, so resigned. The most diabolical of her sex that we ever knew accented all her honey devil words in just such a hymn-like smoothness. The spirit of WHITFIELD seems hovering in the air, to suck in the blessed tones, so much like his own upon earth: Lady HUNTINGDON claps her neat white wings, and gives it out again in heaven to the sainted ones, in approbation.