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NEW ADELPHI.

MISS KATE TERRY'S FAREWELL.

It is seldom that the theatrical chronicler has to describe a scene like that at the New Adelphi on Saturday, when Miss Kate Terry took her farewell of the stage as Juliet. Successes, demonstrations, and ovations of a kind may be made to order; but the scene of Saturday was one of those genuine, spontaneous, and irrepressible outbursts of public recognition which carry their credentials of sincerity along with them. The widespread feeling that the stage is losing one of its choicest ornaments had been manifested by the full houses, more and more crowded on each successive night, which, even at this deadest of the dead season, have been attracted to the New, Adelphi by Miss Terry's farewell performances. Their attraction came to its climax and its close on Saturday, when the theatre was crammed, from the orchestra to the remotest nook in the gallery where a spectator could press or perch, with such an audience as we have never before seen gathered within its walls. At the conclusion of the tragedy, in the course of which Miss Terry was called for at the end of each act, except the fourth, when the good taste of the more intelligent part of the audience suppressed the demand, Miss Terry came on before the curtain in obedience to a thundering summons from every part of the house, and, almost overcome with the combined excitement of the part and the occasion, stood for some moments curtseying and smiling under the shower of bouquets and the storm of kindly greeting. Nor when she had retired with her armful of flowers—looking, in the white robe and dishevelled hair of Juliet's death scene, as she used to look in Ophelia—was the audience satisfied. Again Miss Terry was recalled, and again she appeared to receive the loud and long-continued plaudits of the crowd. Then the stalls began to clear. But the storm of voices and clapping of hands continued from pit, boxes, and gallery through the overture of the farce, swelling till it threatened to grow into a tempest. The curtain rose for the farce; still the thunder roared. One of the actors, quite inaudible in the clamour, began the performance, but the roar grew louder and louder, till at last Mr. Phillips came on in the dress of Friar Lawrence, and, with a stolidity so well assumed that it seemed perfectly natural, asked, in the stereotyped phrase of the theatre, the pleasure of the audience. “Kate Terry!” was the reply from a chorus of a thousand stentorian voices; and then the fair favourite of the night appeared once more, pale, and dressed to leave the theatre, and, when the renewed roar of recognition had subsided, in answer to her appealing dumb show, spoke, with pathetic effect a few hesitating words, evidently the inspiration of the moment, but more telling than any set speech, to this effect:—“How I wish, from my heart, I could tell you how I feel your kindness—not to-night only, but through the many years of my professional life! What can I say to you but thanks, thanks, and good by?” After this short and simple farewell, under a still louder salvo of acclamation, unmistakably proving itself popular by its hearty uproariousness, the young actress, almost overpowered by the feelings of the moment, retired with faltering steps, and the crowded audience poured out of the house, their sudden exit en masse being, in itself, one of the most flattering tributes to the actress whose last appearance had drawn them together. This remarkable manifestation of popular favour and regard is worth recording, not only as a striking theatrical incident, which those who were present can never forget, but because it proves that the frequenters of even the pit and gallery of a theatre where, till Miss Terry came, the finer springs of dramatic effect have very rarely been drawn on can rapidly be brought to recognize and value acting of a singularly refined and delicate kind—so refined and delicate indeed, that some of those who profess to guide the public taste have been apt to insist on its wanting physical power. 0002 On Saturday night it was made evident to demonstration, if other evidence had been wanting, that Miss Terry had wrought her spells over the frequenters of pit and gallery, as well of boxes and stalls. In the interests of refined dramatic art this is a cheering set off to many indications that seem to make the other way. It shows that if the theatrical “masses”—those who are roughly lumped as the “British public”—are unable to discriminate nicely between diamonds and paste, and so take a good deal of coarse glassware for real stones they are, nevertheless, susceptible to the influence of refined, earnest, intelligent, and conscientious acting when they have the rare opportunity of seeing it. How well Miss Terry's acting merits all these epithets has been abundantly proved, not only through her recent course of farewell performances, in which she has filled a range of parts so widely different as to show a variety of power in itself as rare as the grace, refinement, intelligence, and feeling she has put into her acting, but through the whole of a career extending from four years old to four and twenty. If it is worth saying anything precise of her performances now, we may note here that she never gave a more triumphant answer to the critics who have charged her with want of power than in her acting of Juliet on Saturday. It was striking to observe the marked improvement on her first performance of the part last Tuesday. On Saturday her finest scenes were, unquestionably, those of fiercest (not of tenderest) passion, beautiful as were the latter in themselves. Perhaps the excitement of the occasion wrought most in unison with the feeling of Juliet's more violent passages of emotion. Perhaps the actress wished in this closing performance to assert her power in the point in which alone it had been questioned by fair and competent critics. But whatever the cause, in the scene where Juliet learns Romeo's banishment, in her agonized pleading with her parents, in her subsequent interview with Friar Lawrence, and—crown of the series—in the scene where she drinks the sleeping draught, Miss Terry rose on Saturday to a height she never touched before, and left us more than ever under the impression that the stage is losing in her more than even her warmest admirers have hitherto been content to believe.

Let us close this our last notice of Miss Terry with the hope that in her case the sacrifice of public triumphs may be rewarded by a full measure of that private happiness which is but the just recompense of as exemplary, as laborious, conscientious, and devoted a life, on and off the stage, as the annals of the English theatre—not unfruitful in examples of good wives—can show.

Mr. Anson, the treasurer of the New Adelphi, takes his annual benefit on Tuesday, when will be performed the play of As You Like It, with those excellent artists Mr. and Mrs. Hermann Vezin as Orlando and Rosalind, and Mr. W. Harrison as Amiens.