But if you will not take your turns, you'll none o' you get nothink!
"Abbey Thought!"—"The Quest of the Holy Grail.". These pictures are being exhibited just at the right time, when the Arthurian legend is attracting at the Lyceum. Mr. Edwin A. Abbey has been five years at work upon this most striking series. Their beauties are many: their faults very few, and when these are pointed out to the Anglo-American artist, he gaily replies, "What's the odds as long as I'm Abbey!" Which is true; as none but himself can be his parallel.
A WILDE "IDEAL HUSBAND."
Mr. Oscar Wilde's Ideal Husband, at the Haymarket, is an interesting play up to the end of the Third Act; and if this climax had been contrived more artistically, and less conventionally, the situation at the fall of thecurtain in this act would have been a very powerful one. As it is it is frittered away in conventional dialogue, and the Fourth Act is decidedly weak. It is throughout excellently played by Miss Julia Neilson and Mr. Waller in the two principal characters. Mr. Hawtrey's performance, in spite of his curious habit of raising his voice to such a pitch as to suggest his playing to the cab-rank outside, is admirable. There are here and there sharp bits of dialogue in it, though scarcely a line in the lighter vein that rises above farcical comedy.
Mr. Bishop's Earl of Caversham is a thoroughly natural piece of acting, and Mr. Brookfield's Phipps, the Butler, a bit of character so perfectly rendered that, like Sam Weller's Valentine, it makes you "wish as there was more in it." Miss Fanny Brough, having plenty to say, but not much worth listening to, does her best with a poor part. Miss Maude Millett is nice, and Miss Florence West as unsympathetic as her part was intended to be. That when Sir Robert Chiltern proposed to retire from Parliamentary life no one suggested to him that he should take "the Chiltern Hundreds" is evidently an oversight of the author's, which no doubt he now deeply regrets. The play, though in sharp dialogue not up to Mr. Wilde's high spirits-and-water mark, is an unmistakable success.
