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THE HANDY BOY!

The Missis. "I KNEW YOU HAD PLENTY TO DO, PRIMROSE, BUT I WAS QUITE SURE YOU WOULDN'T MIND TAKING UP THOSE COALS!"

THE OLD AND NEW SCHOOL—FOR SCANDAL.

The two principal figures to be considered are Mr. William Farren, who, as Sir Peter, is a Master of Arts in the Old School, and Miss Rehan, who as Lady Teazle is an experimentalising teacher in the New School for Scandal. All playgoers, whose memory takes them back over a quarter of a century, must be familiar with William Farren's Sir Peter, which, in our time may have been rivalled, but has rarely been equalled (I do not remember his equal in the past), and certainly never excelled. A trifle overdone now and then, a trifle hard in manner here and there, perhaps, but, as a whole, simply admirable. Mr. Daly never made a better engagement than when he secured William Farren for Sir Peter. About Miss Rehan's Lady Teazle there will be various opinions and, truth to tell, I do not precisely know from what point of view and by what standard to judge of her performance. Sir Peter describes her as "a girl bred wholly in the country," and so forth, "yet," he continues, "she now plays her part in all the extravagant fopperies of fashion and the town with as ready a grace as if she had never seen a bush or a grass plot out of Grosvenor Square." To let her country training be perceived through the assumed airs and graces of a town Madame seems to me to be Miss Rehan's object; and in this, granting her ideas of the country hoyden and the town lady to be correct, she certainly succeeds; notably in the scenes with Sir Peter. For thus is the Jekyl-and-Hyde-ness of her character made apparent: in company, in the scandal scenes, she is to be all airs and graces, but when alone with her husband she, in spite of her perpetual wrangling with him, reappears as her own natural self, with most of the polish temporarily rubbed off. But if this be so, then, when in "society," her funny little run and shaking of the head are out of place, while they may be accepted as a relapse into her provincialisms when she is quite free and easy, en tête-à-tête with Sir Peter, and especially bent on captivating him by recalling to his memory the lass of whom he had become desperately enamoured some eight months ago.