s, there are some
more inherent difficulties in the piece. The company at large did not
distinguish themselves. Macduff, to the huge delight of the gallery,
out-Macduff'd the average ranter. The lady who filled the principal
female part has done better on other occasions, but I fear she has not
metal for what she tried last week. Not to succeed in the sleep-walking
scene is to make a memorable failure. As it was given, it succeeded in
being wrong in art without being true to nature.

And there is yet another difficulty, happily easy to reform, which
somewhat interfered with the success of the performance. At the end of
the incantation scene the Italian translator has made Macbeth fall
insensible upon the stage. This is a change of questionable propriety
from a psychological point of view; while in point of view of effect it
leaves the stage for some moments empty of all business. To remedy this,
a bevy of green ballet-girls came forth and pointed their toes about the
prostrate king. A dance of High Church curates, or a hornpipe by Mr. T.
P. Cooke, would not be more out of the key; though the gravity of a
Scots audience was not to be overcome, and they merely expressed their
disapprobation by a round of moderate hisses, a similar irruption of
Christmas fairies would most likely convulse a London theatre from pit
to gallery with inextinguishable laughter. It is, I am told, the Italian
tradition; but it is one more honoured in the breach than the
observance. With the total disappearance of these damsels, with a
stronger Lady Macbeth, and, if possible, with some compression of those
scenes in which Salvini does not appear, and the spectator is left at
the mercy of Macduffs and Duncans, the play would go twice as well, and
we should be better able to follow and enjoy an admirable work of
dramatic art.

III

BAGSTER'S "PILGRIM'S PROGRESS"

I have here before me an edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress," bound in
green, without a date, and described as "illustrated by nearly three
hundred engravings, and memoir of Bunyan." On the outside it is lettered
"Bagster's Illustrated Edition," and after the author's apology, facing
the first page of the tale, a folding pictorial "Plan of the Road" is
marked as "drawn by the late Mr. T. Conder," and engraved by J. Basire.
No further information is anywhere vouchsafed; perhaps the publishers
had judged the work too unimportant; and we are still left ignorant
whether or not we o