eminent histrionic genus which has made his elder brother, Mr. WENDELL
PHILLIPS, so popular a Reformer. Still, if he was bent upon writing
plays he should have confined himself to dramatizing the more quiet and
domestic of Dr. WATTS'S poems. "How doth the little busy bee"--for
example--could have been turned into quite a nice little five-act drama,
had Mr. PHILLIPS condescended to grapple with so simple a subject. But
no, he must indulge in battles, and Sepoys, and Butchers of St.
BARTHOLOMEW, and dancing girls and things. He will write sensational
plays, let the consequences be what they may. Hence we are made to
suffer from _Not Guilty, The Huguenot_, and similar harrowing
spectacles. The _Huguenot_, which has just died a lingering death at
BOOTH'S Theatre, is an aggravated case of dramatic misdemeanor on the
part of the author, since it is wantonly stretched out into five acts,
when it could properly be compressed into three. A strict compliance
with the old maxim, "_De mortuis nil desperandum nisi prius_," (I
haven't quite forgotten my Latin yet,) would oblige me to refrain from
abusing it, now that it is happily dead; but, as another proverb puts
it, "The law knows no necessity," and I therefore can do as I choose.
Here, then, is its corpse, exhumed as a warning to those who may be
about to witness any other of Mr. PHILLIPS'S dramas. I flatter myself
that the disinterested public will agree with me, that if all the
Huguenots were as tedious as Mr. WATTS PHILLIPS'S private _Huguenot_,
the massacre of St. BARTHOLOMEW was a pleasing manifestation of a very
natural and commendable indignation on the part of their much-suffering
fellow-citizens not of Protestant descent.

ACT I.--_Scene, a tavern in the outskirts of Paris_. RENE, _the
Huguenot, is pretending to sleep on an uncomfortable wooden bench. A
drunken villain insults a lovely gipsy_. RENE _gets up and kills him,
and escapes his pursuers by falling over a convenient precipice.