and splitting the ears of the groundlings. But in what description of pieces? In dramas, I declare and maintain, in which, for all the jargon, silliness, and buffoonery, the immutable principles of right and justice are asserted; in which virtue, in the end, is always triumphant, and vice is punished; in which cowardice and falsehood are hissed, and bravery and integrity vehemently applauded; in which, were we to sift away the bad grammar, and the extravagant action, we should find the dictates of the purest and highest morality. These poor people can’t help misplacing their h’s, and fighting combats of six with tin broadswords. They haven’t been to the university of Cambridge; they can’t compete for the middle-class examinations; they don’t subscribe to the “Saturday Review;” they have never taken dancing lessons from Madame Michau; they have never read Lord Chesterfield’s Letters; they can’t even afford to purchase a “Shilling Handbook of Etiquette.” Which is best? That they should gamble in low coffee-shops, break each other’s heads with pewter pots in public-houses, fight and wrangle at street corners, or lie in wait in doorways and blind alleys to rob and murder, or that they should pay their threepence for admission into the gallery of the “Vic.”—witness the triumph of a single British sailor over twelve armed ruffians, who are about to carry off the Lady Maud to outrage worse than death; see the discomfiture of the dissolute young nobleman, and the restitution of the family estates (through the timely intervention of a ghost in a table-cloth) to the oppressed orphan? And of this nature are the vast mass of transpontine melodramas. The very “blood-and-murder” pieces, as they are termed, always end with the detection of the assassin and his condign punishment. George Cruikshank’s admirable moral story of “The Bottle” was dramatised at the “Vic.,” and had an immense run. They are performing “Never Too Late to Mend,” now, over the water, to crowded houses. If we want genteel improprieties, sparkling immoral repartees, decorously scandalous intrigues, and artful cobwebs of _double entendre_, touching on the seventh commandment, we must cross the bridges and visit the high-priced, fashionably-attended theatres of the West-end. At a West-end theatre, was produced the only immoral version of an immoral (and imbecile) “Jack Sheppard,” which is, even now, vauntingly announced as being the “authorised version”—the only one licensed by the Lord Chamberlain; and in that “authorised version” occurs the line, “Jack Sheppard is a thief, but he never told a lie,” a declaration than which the worst dictum of howling Tom Paine or rabid Mary Wolstoncraft was not more subversive of the balance of moral ethics. And, at a West-end theatre, likewise, his Lordship the Chamberlain authorised the production of a play, whose story, regarded either as a melodrama or as the libretto of a trashy Italian opera, has not been equalled for