Zbe apertator,1ap 22itb, 1852
To the very small committee of Adelphi producers we are enabled now to add the name of Mr. Mark Lemon; who has all the geniality, popular humour, and knowledge of English stage-effect necessary for his task. His new piece of Sea and Land, though built on the somewhat hacknied foundation of a suspicion of murder, wrongly incurred, gathers freshness from the novelty of the accessories (the scene is laid in a smuggling coast-town), and above all, from the elaborate manner in which the character- of a girl, educated only among desperadoes, has been worked up both by the author and the actress. " Wild Meg," the smuggler's daughter, is depicted with the same intention as the savage boy in Mr. Dickens's " Ghost Story," namely, that of showing the evil that results from a brutalised condition of the humbler orders. She is endowed with surliness, ferocity, and low insolence, but at the same time with a keen feeling for kindness; and at the conclusion of the piece she dies of a broken heart, because she is the means of bringing to justice a man who, though he is a dissolute villain of the " O. Smith " school, has been to her a benefactor. 1 he drama has in other respects that solidity of interest and variety of incident which entitle it to rank with the most popular productions at the same house; but. Wild `Meg, raised to the most wondrous reality by Mrs. Keeley, is the feature of the work.
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