The Adelphi is famed as the theatre where wonderful performers
of all descriptions, from the Elephant of Siam to Jim Crow, are to be seen; and YATES, indefatigable in his exertions to secure every novelty in season, has succeeded in catching a large blue (or rather green) bottle fly! notwithstanding, as he himself told the audience, the managers of Covent Garden and of Drury Lane were both intent on the same curious object. Whether the fortunate manager seized his prize by superior dexterity, by the finer texture of his web of policy, or by a more widely open palm, matters not to the public. There the Brob- dignag insect is, safely lodged in that snug little fly-cage the Adelphi Theatre ; and as well worth going to see as the Chimpanzee, or his successor at the Zoological Gardens the Ourang-outan.
A fly, however, is only one of the transformations which this pro- fessor of the metempsychosean art, Signor HERVIO NANO, accom- plishes. His facility in shuffling off this mortal coil, is attributable to the freak of Nature, by which his lower extremities have been curtailed of their fair proportions : he is thus enabled to clothe himself in the skin of a baboon, and perform the monkey tricks of climbing and leaping, as well as to creep into the shining mail of a colossal fly. In his mortal shape, Signor NANO is down to the waist a very handsome- featured and well proportioned personage ; but his legs and thighs are abbreviated to such an extreme degree, that, as he moves about, (which be does with great celerity,) he looks like the head and trunk of a man upon castors—or one of' the children's tumbler-dolls with bulbous
bodies, the size of life. He plays his part in the melodramatic spectacle got up for the nonce, called The Gnome Fly, with great animation of
look and gesture; and speaks a few words of English, pieced out with
Italian, (his native tongue,) with fluency and distinctness. In his human form, indeed, he is an interesting abridgment of mortality : but ilia tricks and gambols as the Baboon are infinitely amusing. He mops and mows, climbs and runs on all fours with monkey-like agility; and if his mask were naturally painted and his coat a little more in coo: formity with the fashion of the simious race, he might easily be rag, taken for a baboon. When he appears as the Fly, it requires to fano! that we are looking at the insect through a microscope instead of la opera-glass, in older to bring the idea of his dimensions within elm, pass; and a scrutinous observer may detect the motionless state of his wings during his flight across the stage ; but he crawls up the side and along the roof of the proscenium with such fly-like gravity and stew. ness, that when he approaches a cranny, you almost fear lest a spider should dart out and lay bold of him. Certainly the mart-ily is netau a hum.
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