Tent a few days ago to see My Friend the Prince at the Garrick Theatre—it is very amusing and very well put on the stage. The Prince of Pannonia for reasons best known to himself is lost and for other reasons two other men dress in his uniform and pretend they are he—he being in the house where the action takes place all the time in the capacity of private secretary. Plot there is practically none, but the situations created by the various mistakes that occur are so amusing as to be the excuse for a good Jaugh, which seems the main object in most of the plays of the present day. Last Saturday the Prince and Princess of Wales journeyed down to Canterbury to open the restored Chapter-house of the Cathedral, and on Monday by special invitation of the Dean Sir Henry Irving read selections from Tennyson's "Becket" in the self-same Chapter-house to an audience of some five or six hundred people, on the spot where Becket fell. There are people who say that Irving ix an actor who bereft of stage nccessovies would make no mark, that only by the wonderful way in which he staged his pieces will he be remembered by future generations; but those who had the privily ego of listening to him last Monday must surely change this opinion if ever they held it, as the actor had not been reading for five minutes ere the spell of his genius had asserted its sway—concentrating their attention as he oe each character to life. Not single character, no matter of how slight an import, but was embodied and done justice to. Time after time was the reading interrupted with outbursts of applause and many an eye was dim as the actor brought vividly home to each the inherent pathos of the Archbishop's end, and—to my mind the greatest tribute an actor can have—when the reading ceased, for some seconds the audience remained silent, overcome with sorrow as they realised, possibly for the first time, the tragedy that had been enacted on that very spot so many hundreds of years ago, but this silence was speedily followed by applacne so genuine and so prolonged that Sir Henry must have felt amply repaid for what must have Veen no light task even for him.
J. K.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.