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New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9188, 18 October 1888, Page 5

Ix witnessing the pictures of Oriental life, presented from night to night at the Opera House by Miss von Hnkelstein, one cannot but he struck by the contrast in the principal characteristic of Eastern and Western civilisation. Indeed, so habituated are our minds to our own forms of life, that it is hardly possible for us to conceive of a civilisation without change. Change we regard as the very essence of civilisation, and without it we think there must be not merely stagnation but decay. But here we have a civilisation that, in all its forms and habits of life, has served the needs of a people for thousands of years, and under which ■kings and peasants have lived and laboured, joyed and sorrowed, and died, without departing by an iota from the ways of life that were practised by their forefathers in the infancy of time. We cannot imagine anything that should be more deeply interesting to us, striving and -struggling as we are in the feverish earnestness of colonial life, than to have this little piece of the still, quiet life of the old, old times dropped in our midst. With a dramatic power that gives a very vivid realisation of the scenes she paints, this talented daughter of the East places before us a picture drawn on the lines of existing life it is true, but exactly a reproduction of the scenes and incidents of two, three, and four thousand years ago. Nothing so unique has ever been presented in this city before, nor anything bearing so marked a contrast to the bustling, worrying, restless, but practical life of to-day. It is not merely to the student of the Bible that Miss von Finkelstein's most dramatic representations of Oriental and antique life are interesting, but to any mind capable of appreciating the simple and idyllic peasant life of Palestine, as well as the bright colon and sensuous enjoyment of the dreamy, gorgeous East, these living tableaux present a treat not before enjoyed by anyone in Auckland who has not himself ■trodden scenes, every yard of which is sacred or historic ground.