The Morning Chronicle.
The Morning Chronicle.
The Morning Chronicle.
The Morning Chronicle.
Oct. 18, 1813.
Miss Stephens made her appearance again on Saturday at Covent-Garden, as Mandane, in Artaxerxes. She becomes more and more a favourite with the public. Her singing is delicious; but admired as it is, it is not yet admired as it ought to be. Oh, if she had been wafted to us from Italy!—A voice more sweet, varied, and flexible, was perhaps never heard on an English stage. In ‘The Soldier tired,’ her voice, though it might be said to cleave the very air, never once lost its sweetness and clearness. ‘Let not rage thy bosom firing’ was deservedly and rapturously encored. But if we were to express a preference, it would be to her singing the lines, ‘What was my pride is now my shame,’ &c. in which the notes seemed to fallfrom her lips like the liquid drops from the bending flower, and her voice fluttered and died away with the expiring conflict of passion in her bosom. We know, and have felt the divine power and impassioned tones of Catalani—the lightning of her voice and of her eye—but we doubt whether she would give the ballad style of the songs in Artaxerxes, simple but elegant, chaste but full of expression, with equal purity, taste, and tenderness.
Mr. Liston’s acting in Love, Law, and Physic, was as excellent as it always is. It is hard to say, whether the soul of Mr. Liston has passed into Mr. Lubin Log, or that of Mr. Lubin Log into Mr. Liston:—but a most wonderful congeniality and mutual good understanding there is between them. A more perfect personation we never witnessed. The happy compound of meanness, ignorance, vulgarity, and conceit, was given with the broadest effect, and with the nicest discrimination of feeling. Moliere would not have wished for a richer representative of hisGentilhomme Bourgeois. We insist the more on this point, because of all imitations we like the imitation of nature best. The markedcockneyismof pronouncing the V for the W, was the only circumstance to which we could object, and this is an interpolation on the part since we first saw it, suggested (we suppose) by friends. It is a hackneyed and cheap way of producing a laugh, unworthy of the true comic genius of Liston.