Those who have been at the trouble to read the various and conflicting notices of the chief London journals upon Mary Anderson's performances--for those of the great provincial towns she visited present a singular unanimity in her favor--must have found it difficult, if not impossible, to decide either on her merits as an artist, or on the true place to be assigned to her in the temple of the drama. The veriest misogynist among critics was compelled, in spite of himself, to confess to the charm of her strange beauty. Hers, as all agreed, was the loveliest face and the most graceful figure which had appeared on the London boards within the memory of a generation. According to some she was an accomplished actress, but she lacked that divine spark which stamps the true artist. Others attributed her success to nothing but her personal grace and beauty; while one critic, bolder than his fellows, even went so far as to declare that whether she wore the attire of a Grecian maid, of a fine French lady of a century ago, or of the fabled Galatea, only pretty Miss Anderson, of Louisville, Kentucky, peeped out through every disguise. Several causes, perhaps, combined to this uncertain sound which went forth from the trumpet of the dramatic critic. Mary Anderson was an American artist, who came here, it is true, with a great American reputation; but so had come others before her, some of whom had wholly failed to stand the fierce test of the London footlights. Then to "damn her with faint praise," would not only be a safe course at the outset, but the steps to a becoming _locus peniteniæ_ would be easy and gradual if the vane should, in spite of the critics, veer round to the point of popular favor. One of the most distinguished of English journalists lately observed in the House of Commons that certain writers in back parlors were in the habit of palming off their effusions as the voice of the great English public, till that voice made itself heard. When the voice of the English theater-going public upon Mary Anderson came to make itself heard in the crowded and enthusiastic audiences of the Lyceum, in the friendship of all that was most cultivated and best worth knowing in London society, it failed altogether to echo the trumpet, we will not say of the back parlor critics only, but of some critics distinguished in their profession, who can little have anticipated how quickly the popular verdict would modify, if not reverse their own.