The County Council has started halfpenny busses in the Strand.—Three of the most important shops in the Elswick Works were burnt down on the th.—Mr. Richard Bland of the famous Bland Act is dead.—The Chinese cruiser Haichi, Captain F. A.A. G. Tate, R.N., sailed from Sheerness for China on the 9th ult.—Silver closed at 273d.—The business in toa Was unimportant at rather lower prices.—The Shantung Railway Ca. was incorporated at Barlin on the 14th, with a capital of £2,700,000.—There is no truth in the report of the race between the steamers Sikh and Indrani.—Amhold, Karbery and Co.'s river steamers are to bevin running in November, and Melchers and Co.'s in March next.
Tae Overland Mail gives the following resume of the criticisms in the London papers of Mme. Sarah Bernhardt's rendering of Hamlet There was a crowded audience at the Adelphi Theatre on 12th June, when Mme. Bernhardt made her first appearance in England in the part of Hamlet. Few of the Bapers Gad much to say in prasg of Mme. ernhardt's Hamlet, though all find it interesting and individual. The Times observes She makes Hamlet a pleasant, humorous, very gay prince, who in happier circum: stances would have been the life and soul of the Court—a merry trifler with old Polonius, the first to welcome any diversion such as the travelling players afford, a companion Yorie. would still have delighted to consort and jest with. Hamlet, as Mme. Berahardt reads the part, is I the moody Dane than a full-blooded Latin, full of energy, readily provoked to tent Bassions to tatters, to break out into violent reclamation or denunciation, and really feeling that it is a cursed spite" which sets him to remedy the out-of-joint time.
One may not agree with the actress! conception, bat one cannot deny that the whole production is full of clever original touches, and that from beginning to end there is a vigour and interest mit which more truly Shakespearean readings have often failed to give.
The Daily Telegraph remarks Hamlet was a Dane, drawa by an Englishman_with English ideas. Sarah Bernhardt's Hamlet is a Dane, pictured though French gla It ts youthful, i pulsive, and nally boisterous—prone to sudden waves and gusts of passion eccentric and iaulti-changing. For lack of a better term, it might almost be described as volatile The boy with the flaxen hair is full of impetuousness and high feeling. His nobility of character, his tenderness, his love of truth and hutred of falsehood, are ever pronounced. What we lack in him is that serenity, that calmness, that philosophic - cast, that unswerving and silent devotion to a resolute, terrible, and unbending purpose. He carries himself too much on the surface.
Says the Stundard critic One hesitates to speak in dispraise of an artist so universally commended; but it is necessary to be frank, in spite of the adulators who can see no fault in anything Mme. Bernhardt is pleased to do, and the opinion must, therefore, be exessed that her attempt to represent hamlet is very far indeed from anything like success. It is exceedingly doubtful whether any woman could ever give illusion to the part of the Prince of Denmark, but it is very certain that Mme. Bernhardt. does not do so, in spite of much evident care and thought, which have led to the introduction of several new ideas—more or less remote from Shakespeare. The chief characteristic of the performance may be described as its extreme femininity; she is always an excitable lady masquerade ing in man's clothes.
The Duily News says That the result was in some degree disappointing must be confessed; she was, as will be expected, great once more in
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.