MA'TTHEINS'S CALEB PIPKIN, AND REEVE'S YANKEE CAPTAIN.
IF ever perfection walked on the boards of a theatre, it is seen in MA.TTHEWS'S Mr. P. That a tinker should be the mirth-inspirer of a town theatre !—It must be a tinkerly place that Adelphi, may be the reflection of the fastidious. A tinker with his pots and pans is, at any rate, as legitimate a source of mirth as the fool with his cap and bells, of whom our good and wise ancestors were enamoured. But then, it is a peerless tinker—a nonpareil of a tinker—a tinker such as never mended kettles, or got arles under pretence of mending them, but on the boards of the Adelplu
theatre. Nor do we, in admitting this, derogate from the merits of the character and the performance. A personage approaching
within a hundred degrees of Falstaff, for example, never existed in real life ;—not even when the Boar's Head was the rendezvous of a prince and his satellites. The only Fidstuff of real life is a gross
fat man, with a certain self-complacency in his fatness, but whose
wit is a flame dying like a wick smothered in its own oil. The Falstaff of the stage was the creation of one neither fat nor fat- witted ; who, like ZEUXIS the painter, drew not from one model, but threw into the composition all the humour that society and his own soul supplied. Thus MarrHaws's Mr. P. with the manners, bearing, look, and slang of the tinker-tribe, sublimated into a composition much more diverting than the whole worshipful body could itself furnish, keeps up a feu de joie of jokes, that seem to drop from a mouth too full to contain, them, the least of which would among his neighbours set up an actual tinker in wit for life.
MATTHEWS is at home at the Adelph. : he has been so long a chartered libertine, that he no longer wears the uniform of the regular stage. with ease and comfort. At the Adelphi, his elbows may please themselves, and if the suit is not to their liking, he can have it eked or altered till it sit as easy and as close as a French- made glove. We are glad to have him where he is,—on a stage where he can serve us, doubly-distilled, the humour he loves, and the eccentricities of the life he understands. Whilst he flourishes, we shall never want a laugh ; nor, whilst the wide field of low life is exposed to his observation, will he ever lack the means of making us one.
If we exclude from the estimate the fragments of his " Trip to America," with which Manalaws enriches the part, we do not think he is a better Yankee Captain than JOHN REEVE—perhaps not so good. The part squared more aptly with the peculiarities of JOHN, who had a humorous gravity ; that was a rich relief to the awkward situations into which the Captain is thrown. The effect on your risible faculties was much the same as what is pro- duced by the sight of a formal quiz discomposed by the cracker which mischievous boys have planted a posteriori. There were at the same time an odd twisting of the features, a ducking of the head, and a jauntiness of gait, together with a twinkle of the eye and a look of dubious intelligence, in which knowingness mingled with vacancy,—that, whether transatlantic or not, were highly be- coming in the Captain Boroughclift of the Adelphi. The drollery of MATTHEWS, with the exceptions already made, is not, we think, so apt to shake the sides as JOHN REEVE'S.
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