ABSTRACT
The success achieved by the two plays recently produced at St. James’s and Princess’s theatres, founded on Miss Braddon’s novels, Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, will, doubtless, open a new field to the dramatist and give a new direction to popular taste. If “increase of appetite grows by what it feeds upon,” there is no foretelling the state to which the stage will come. Intensely exciting as melodrama hitherto had been found, it is a question whether it ever surpassed in this respect the literature of the Old Bailey, which of late has been so popular. This is indeed a fearful position, and one that makes the blood of ordinary men run cold. At the Crystal Palace an afternoon and evening fête is to take place to-day to celebrate the arrival of Princess Alexandra, and there is to be a great torchlight procession with ill amination of the fountains next Tuesday evening.
