Mr. Lestocq's amusing farce, The Sportsman, now being played at the Comedy Theatre, must inevitably recall to the experienced play-goer the plot and situations of The Serious Family and The Colonel, Truth, The Candidate, Artful Cards, and it may be some others of the same extensive dramatic family. In this piece the husband, under pretence of joining a shooting-party, is accustomed to absent himself from home, in order to indulge his propensity for gambling, and he invariably brings home to his wife the hares and rabbits he has shot. This is "his little game." Just so did the husband in The Serious Family, when Aminadab Sleek remarks that he has seen something very like them at a neighbouring poulterer's. In the Second Act the police make a raid on the gambling Club, and the husband escapes in any coat he can lay hold of, following the example of the unfortunate hero of Artful Cards, only that the situation at the end of that Second Act was far stronger in that play than it is in The Sportsman. In Artful Cards the unfortunate hero escaped, carrying a trombone, which turned up in evidence against him when he was inventing plausible explanations to his wife. In fact, The Sportsman is concocted out of excellent old material cleverly worked up, with only one new point in it, to which, as it has escaped the eye of the English adapter, it would be useless to draw his attention; yet, had he seen it, he might therefrom have developed a really original sequence of perplexing situations. The dialogue is not particularly brilliant; jerky, not crisp. But such is the "go" of the principals, and especially of Mr. Hawtrey, who is the life and soul of the farce, that the laughter is hearty and continuous.