SIR WILLIAM DON.

BEFORE speaking of this gentleman's performance, we should confess to having gone to the Play with very erroneous impressions. The town chat wholly misrepresented what was to be looked for. A baronet's appearance as a theatrical “star” was, of course, matter for lively curiosity, and, that his favorite line of characters should be the clowns of low comedy, was quite enough to give the new star a comet's equipment—of a tale. And, to the usual and invariable demurrer, ("the papers say so and so, but what is the fact?") the tale was told, viz :—that Sir William was a London blasé, who had ruined himself with drink and dissipation, and, having shown a little talent over the bottle, as a buffoon, he had slid over the horizon where the sun and other luminaries go to recuperate, and was trying the stage as a desperate extremity. The play advertised was the Comedy of "UsedUp," and we took our seat in the parterre, sorry for the professional necessity which made it worth while for us to see what we erroneously presumed would be only a humiliating commentary on the title of the piece.

Curious enough-(a phenomenon we scarce ever saw before)— the "house" was both very thin and very fashionable. The

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ladies who prefer "fast men" were there, in un-missing Pleiades. The belles who think for themselves-a sparse and glittering sprinkle of the Via Lactea-were brilliantly conspicuous. It looked well for the new comer that the twenty or thirty men who constitute the average maximum of presentable English in New York, seemed all to be there. The remainder of the audience might apparently have been divided between the press-ditti, the indigenous dandies, the sporting men, and a few innocent 66 strangers in town" who had come to see a live Baronet.

The supernumeraries dialogued up the attention of the audience, and in walked Sir William as Sir Charles"-a Baronet representing a Baronet-and proceeded to picture the insufferableness of an unarousable platitude of sensation. The reader knows the play-turning on the exhaustion of the sensibilities for pleasure, and their renewal by a little wedlock and adversity. We began to think, after a few sentences—it was so perfectly like a scene in a real life—that Sir William was disgusted with his thin audience, and was simply repeating the part, in his own character, for form's sake. Meantime we had taken a look at the man.

Sir William-(as little as possible like the "used-up" Sir Charles of the play)—was an unusually tall specimen of health and adolescence, with that unexplainable certainty of a clean shirt and every pore open, which distinguishes those Englishmen to whom economy in washing has never been suggested. A clear eye; a remarkably thin and translucent nostril; a skin beneath whose fresh surface his wine, if he had ever drank any, had played the "Arethusa, coming never to the light;" singularly beautiful teeth, and a smile as new and easy as a girl's of sixteen; a long-leggedness that would have been awkward with anything

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NATURAL ACTING.

but the unconsciousness of good blood; hands (the rarest accomplishment in the world) with every finger negligently at ease; perfect self-possession, and an Englishman's upper and lower nationalities, (long straps and chin in a voluminous parenthesis of shirt collar,) were some of the particulars of the Sir William we were compelled to substitute for the one we had expected to see.

As we said before, Sir William seemed to have given up the idea of acting, and to be simply walking through the part in his own character. He received the gay widow who came in for charity," proposed" to her for excitement, showed a lord-andmaster's half-awareness that his pretty little dependent fostersister was in love with him, quizzed his companions, yawned and lounged-exactly as a gentleman in real life would do every one of these very things. In France, of course, this would be the perfection of acting. On the English and American stage, where nothing "brings down the house" but exaggeration and caricature, it is voted "slow," " tame," and ". a failure," as we had

heard it described.

But, we have yet to speak of the novelty for Americans, that is to be found in the performances of this new star, viz:—the tone, accentuation and pronunciation of the English language, as spoken by gay, clever, high-born and high-bred young Englishmen. We do not believe there could possibly be a finer example of this, than in Sir William Don. Simple as it seems, and unconsciously as he does it, it is an art that must have been begun by a man's grandmother, at least, and cannot be learned in one generation. A vulgar nobleman (and there are such things) cannot do it." A man must have good taste, and conscious superiority, as well as good blood and conversance with the best society, to speak that quality of English. The playful but perfect justice to every con

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sonant and vowel-an apparent carelessness governed by the classic correctness of Eton and Oxford-a clean tongued and metallic delivery of cadences-a delicately judicious apotheosis of now and then a slang word-a piquant unexpectedness in the location of such tones as precede smiles or affectations of ignorance-a certain reluctance of the voice, as if following the thought superciliously-and, withal, a sort of absolute incapability of being disturbed or astonished into a variation of even a quarter of a tone—are among the component elements of this which we call an art, and which is, of all the tests of a man's quality in England, the most relied upon and the most unmistakeable. To most of those who hear Sir William Don, his nice excellence in this difficult art will seem only a simple and natural way he has of speaking; but, to artistic ears and perceptions practised in travel, it will be a luxury indeed to hear him-(in parts, that is to say, where he personates a gentleman, and does not disguise his voice and accent.)" The way English is spoken by the men of mark in St James' street, is a Jenny-Lind-ism in its way—as inimitable as her copy of the articulation of "the blest”—and, if Sir William Don would confine himself to high comedy, and show us the gentleman only, he would, with his natural gift at imitation, and his evidently superior talent, make a special orbit of success for himself, while, at the same time, he gives us, in America, what nobody else on the stage is at all likely to treat us to.

PARODI'S LUCREZIA BORGIA.

FROM a Chevalier Bayard to a Don Quixote-from an enterprising merchant" to a headstrong bankrupt-from a philanthropist to an egotist--from a saint to a hypocrite-from the finest eloquence to the flattest bombast, and from true poetry to terrible twaddle-are some of the thousand variations of that " one step" mentioned in the old proverb "from the sublime to the ridiculous." The more we see of the "successes" of this world, the closer seems to us the neighborhood between every true thing and its counterfeit, and the more critical the risk of taking the wrong for the right one. We never saw a more even chance of "hit or miss" than in the acting of Parodi. In Norma, she made such a false extravaganza of the part, that we gave up all hope of being pleased with her-in Lucrezia Borgia, she played and sang most daringly and truthfully well. If we had seen her first in this her second performance, we should have received a very different impression from her début―eagerly looking for her next evening's brilliancy, as a star of the first magnitude, instead of dropping telescope, as we did, not to waste our astronomy on an ignis fatuus that we presumed would presently dissolve.

To treat our country readers to something new about Parodi,