UNCLE TOM AT BARNUM'S.—Uncle Tom has been brought out at the Museum with a good deal of care as regards scenery and appointments, but with no care at all to preserve fidelity to the spirit of the story as told by Mrs. Stowe. The drama is shorn of salient points, and emasculated of the virility which has given life and reputation to the book, to as great an extent as could be done and still preserve a respectable show of adherence to the original story.

  The piece will not bear comparison with the representation of the National in point of nature, and pathos, and effect, as well as in adherence to the tale on which the play is founded. The exquisite character of Little Eva, so touchingly rendered by Cordelia Howard, here amounts to nothing. So, too, the original character of Topsey, while it cannot be extinguished, is, in many respects, but a pointless caricature, as rendered at the Museum. The striking scene of the slave auction, so susceptible of dramatic coloring and effect, is touched with the lightest hand, and its point and moral totally extinguished by converting its close into a ridiculous squabble, and ending it amid shouts of laughter. At the end of the play, Uncle Tom is allowed to run with flying colors, after having had a pretty good time, so far as is seen or represented, throughout his entire pilgrimage.

  It were impossible that the character of Mrs. Stowe's great work could be put upon the stage, and while preserving any kind of fidelity to the original creations, fail to inculcate in some degree the great lesson her book teaches. But so far as any play founded on her story can be degraded to a mere burlesque negro performance, we think it is here accomplished. What little edge the play has, the dramatic editor has undertaken to blunt and destroy, by the absurd and stale defense of Slavery put into the mouth of St. Clare, to the effect, that free labor in England is reduced by the British Aristocracy to as low a point of suffering and degradation as Slave labor is here.

  The effort of the dramatist has evidently been to destroy the point and moral of the story of Uncle Tom, and to make a play to which no apologist for Slavery could object. He has succeeded; and in doing so, has made a drama which has nothing to recommend it but its name.