III. ——he determined to make restitution. He could not return the identical articles he had taken. Alas! they were already melted. So he broke into another house, ascertaining first that the occupier was not serving his country——
IV. ——and then rebroke into the first house (silencing the cook who had been left in charge and was inclined to raise an alarm) and placed there the results of the second burglary. After that he felt much better, and could look patriots in the face.
AT THE PLAY.
"David Copperfield."
If it were a simple question of bulk, few authors would lend themselves to the process of compression so well as Charles Dickens; but the scheme of David Copperfield is too complex, and its interests too many and competitive, to be packed into a three-hours' play, even by Mr. Louis Parker, master of the tabloid. Of the main themes—the career of the hero himself, the machinations of Uriah Heep, the tragedy of Little Em'ly—only the last was at all effective in pillule form. The figure of David Copperfield—always pleasant if rather colourless—served to hold the play together; but the central experience of his life was treated with the extreme of haziness. We were informed of his engagement to Dora, his marriage, her illness, her death, all with the brevity of a French official communiqué; but as for the child-wife herself we never so much as set eyes on her. While again we gathered that the designs of Uriah Heep were ultimately confounded, nobody without the aid of memory or imagination could possibly have penetrated their obscurity.
On the other hand—whether with or without the connivance of Sir Herbert Tree I dare not conjecture—the person of Wilkins Micawber was given a prominence out of all proportion to his share in any one of the plots. Unlike the something that was to make his fortune, he was always "turning up," and, whenever he did, he practically had the stage to himself.
I am far from quarrelling with this arrangement, for I have never seen Sir Herbert in better form. His humour was of the richest, yet full of quiet subtleties, and merely to gaze upon his grotesque figure was a pure delight. That he should have permitted himself, in a spirit of creative irresponsibility, to deviate at times into the borderland of farce, and become an hilarious blend of himself and Mr. Henry James (I don't know why he suggested to me a burlesque of Mr. Henry James, for I have never known that most distinguished of writers to lapse from decorum) need not trouble anybody in a play where there was no pretence of insisting upon the letter of Dickens.