Pacific, to scribble-talk over his adventures in out-of-the-way places; and though a cautious friend, who had the overhauling of the manuscript, crossed out some of its most characteristic and amusing passages, there is enough left to introduce the writer very fairly to the public. A gay man's views of the manners of the Society Islands-written boldly and merrily as they appeared to an adventurous young officer -could not be otherwise than amusing, even if written with far less talent. The great interest of the book, however, is the description of a most perilous "running of the gauntlet" across the Southern Continent in the time of the late war-Lieut. Wise having been sent, with secret dispatches, from the Pacific Squadron to the city of Mexico, and having traversed alone this twenty-five hundred miles forward and back, mostly on horseback, and with curiously varied adventure. In old times his performances on this duty would have made him a theme for the troubadours.

We shall give next week some extracts from this delightful book, "Los Gringos," (which we believe is a Spanish phrase, partially of reproach, and means foreigners who are in search of adventure,) and we stop for the present with commending it to the perusal of all who would know more of strange scenes and places, and who are curious, moreover, to know how life looks, in these its outskirts, to an unbaptized author and a gentleman of genius.

MADEMOISELLE ALBONI.

A GLIMPSE that we once had of this lady, who is the present "rage" in London, may possibly be worth mentioning to our friendly readers. We were passing a solitary day in Hamburgh, some three years ago. on our return to London from Berlin. The weatherwas vile, and after a weary morning of trudging through the dirty streets under an umbrella, we sat down to the table-d'hôte dinner of the Hotel, expecting no company but foreign clerks and supercargoes, and inclined to satisfy our hunger with shut eyes and ears. The soup was removed, when two persons entered whom we took at first sight to be rather flashy foreigners, and whom we should have guessed to be professed gamblers,

but that the landlord made room for them at the head of the table with more deference than is given to ordinary travellers. One was a slight dark-whiskered man with a moustache, not very prepossessing. The other was a fat and smooth-faced youth, with long hair parted on the middle of the head, fine teeth and fine eyes, an expression of the most sensuous joyousness, and the impulsive laugh of a child. The dress of the latter was rather theatrical, the shirt bosom elaborately worked and ruffled, collar turned down, cravat loose, and the waistcoat ready to burst its tightly drawn buttons with the most un-masculine fulness of the chest. A constant thrusting of the hands cavalierly into the trowsers pockets when not engaged in eating, an apparently complete unconsciousness of observation, and a readiness to laugh loud at the least encouragement, amused us in our idle looking-on, but, though beard there was none, we had no idea that the fat personage in the baggy-hipped pantaloons was a woman! the table as the merry mouth we had been looking at was taking the first puff of a cigar, and the next morning, as we were taking our departure, the landlord informed us that our jolly vis-à-vis was the celebrated Mademoiselle Alboni!

We left

SIR WILLIAM DON.

BEFORE speaking of this gentleman's performance, we should confess to having gone to the Play with very erroneous impressions. The town chat wholly misrepresented what was to be looked for. A baronet's appearance as a theatrical “star” was, of course, matter for lively curiosity, and that his favorite line of characters should be the clowns of low comedy, was quite enough to give the new star a comet's equipment of a tale. And, to the usual and invariable demurrer, ("the papers say so and so, but what is the fact?") the tale was told, viz.,-that Sir William was a London blasé, who had ruined himself with drink and dissipation, and, having shown a little talent over the bottle as a buffoon, he had slid over the horizon where the sun and other luminaries go to recuperate, and was trying the stage as a desperate extremity. The play advertised was the Comedy of

L

"Used-Up," and we took our seat in the parterre, sorry for the professional necessity which made it worth while for us to see what we erroneously presumed would be only a humiliating commentary on the title of the piece.

Curious enough (a phenomenon we scarce ever saw before) -the "house" was both very thin and very fashionable. The ladies who prefer "fast men' were there, in un-missing Pleiades. The belles who think for themselves—a sparse and glittering sprinkle of the Via Lactea-were brilliantly conspicuous. It looked well for the new comer that the twenty or thirty men who constitute the average maximum of presentable English in New York, seemed all to be there. The remainder of the audience might apparently have been divided between the press-ditti, the indigenous dandies, the sporting men, and a few innocent" strangers in town" who had come to see a live Baronet.

The supernumeraries dialogued up the attention of the audience, and in walked Sir William as" Sir Charles”— -a Baronet representing a Baronet-and proceeded to picture the insufferableness of an unarousable platitude of sensation. The reader knows the play-turning on the exhaustion of the sensibilities for pleasure, and their renewal by a little wedlock and adversity. We began to think, after a few sentences -it was so perfectly like a scene in a real life-that Sir William was disgusted with his thin audience, and was simply repeating the part, in his own character, for form's sake. Meantime we had taken a look at the man.

Sir William-(as little as possible like the "used-up" Sir Charles of the play)-was an unusually tall specimen of health and adolescence, with that unexplainable certainty of a clean shirt and every pore open, which distinguishes those Englishmen to whom economy in washing has never been suggested. A clear eye; a remarkably thin and translucent nostril; a skin beneath whose fresh surface his wine, if he had ever drank any, had played the "Arethusa, coming never to the light;" singularly beautiful teeth, and a smile as new and easy as a girl's of sixteen; a long-leggedness that would have been awkward with anything but the unconsciousness of good blood; hands (the rarest accomplishment in the world) with every finger negligently at ease; perfect self possession, and an Englishman's upper and lower nationalities, (long straps and chin in a voluminous parenthesis of shirt collar,)

were some of the particulars of the Sir William we were compelled to substitute for the one we had expected to see.

As we said before, Sir William seemed to have given up the idea of acting, and to be simply walking through the part in his own character. He received the gay widow who came in for charity, "proposed" to her for excitement, showed a lord-and-master's half awareness that his pretty little dependent foster-sister was in love with him, quizzed his companions, yawned and lounged—exactly as a gentleman in real life would do every one of these very things. In France, of course, this would be the perfection of acting. On the English and American stage, where nothing "brings down the house" but exaggeration and caricature, it is voted "slow," "tame," and "a failure," as we had heard it described.

But we have yet to speak of the novelty for Americans, that is to be found in the performances of this new star, viz:—the tone, accentuation and pronunciation of the English language, as spoken by gay, clever, high-born, and high-bred young Englishmen. We do not believe there could possibly be a finer example of this than in Sir William Don. Simple as it seems, and unconsciously as he does it, it is an art that must have been begun by a man's grandmother, at least, and cannot be learned in one generation. A vulgar nobleman (and there are such things) cannot do it. A man must have good taste, and conscious superiority, as well as good blood and conversance with the best society, to speak that quality of English. The playful but perfect justice to every consonant and vowel-an apparent carelessness governed by the classic correctness of Eton and Oxford-a clean-tongued and metallic delivery of cadences-a delicately judicious apotheosis of now and then a slang word-a piquant unexpectedness in the location of such tones as precede smiles or affectations of ignorance—a certain reluctance of the voice, as if following the thought superciliously-and, withal, a sort of absolute incapability of being disturbed or astonished into a variation of even a quarter of a tone-are among the component elements of this which we call an art, and which is, of all the tests of a man's quality in England, the most relied upon and the most unmistakeable. To most of those who hear Sir William Don, his nice excellence in this difficult art will seem only a simple and natural way he has of speaking; but, to

artistic ears and perceptions practised in travel, it will be a luxury indeed to hear him-(in parts, that is to say, where he personates a gentleman, and does not disguise his voice and accent). The way English is spoken by the men of mark in St. James's-street, is a Jenny-Lind-ism in its way-as inimitable as her copy of the articulation of "the blest"—and, if Sir William Don would confine himself to high comedy, and show us the gentleman only, he would, with his natural gift at imitation, and his evidently superior talent, make a special orbit of success for himself, while, at the same time, he gives us, in America, what nobody else on the stage is at all likely

to treat us to.

PARODI'S LUCREZIA BORGIA.

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FROM a Chevalier Bayard to a Don Quixote-from an enterprising merchant" to a beadstrong bankrupt-from a philanthropist to an egotist-from a saint to a hypocrite-from the finest eloquence to the flattest bombast, and from true poetry to terrible twaddle-are some of the thousand variations of that "one step" mentioned in the old proverb "from the sublime to the ridiculous." The more we see of the "successes" of this world, the closer seems to us the neighborhood between every true thing and its counterfeit, and the more critical the risk of taking the wrong for the right one. We never saw a more even chance of "hit or miss" than in the acting of Parodi. In Norma, she made such a false extravaganza of the part, that we gave up all hope of being pleased with her-in Lucrezia Borgia, she played and sang most daringly and truthfully well. If we had seen her first in this her second performance, we should have received a very different impression from her début-eagerly looking for her next evening's brilliancy, as a star of the first magnitude, instead of dropping telescope, as we did, not to waste our astronomy on an ignis fatuus that we presumed would presently dissolve.

To treat our country readers to something new about Parodi, however the critics having left all the adjectives in the language breathless with praising her-let us say a word or two upon the defect that is most apparent.

There are female physiognomies that would be improved by