acter and representative experience. Over both the houses there is an air of opulence, romance, and poetry, and yet of modernity and fact. In the palace of Orsino that prince is suffering from the melancholy of hopeless love. In the hall of Olivia that cloistered beauty is suffering from grief for her dead brother and father. At the side of Orsino stands the disguised Viola,-lovelorn for her master's favor. At the side of Olivia stands the saturnine, self-worshipful Malvolio, nursing his conceit that the great lady may yet become his wife. Around those serious figures eddy the vinous revels of stout Sir Toby Belch, the puling capers of vapid Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the antics of mischievous Maria, and the romance of the mystified Sebastian. It is a picture in little of the way of all things. Love is blind and will not see its own comfort, which is close at hand. Selfopinion makes itself a fool, and comes, amid inextinguishable laughter, to utter disgrace. Frolic and revel sparkle, for a moment, and turn to nothing; irrational Fortune scatters her favors wholly without logic; truth and devotion are rewarded by chance; and motley smiles over all. The comedy is a profusion of wild flowersa medley of whimsicality, drollery, sentiment, and grace, with abundance in it of kindly satire and genial philosophy, to make it enjoyable while it is passing and to enshrine it in loving remembrance after it has gone.

"JOHN THE BAPTIST."

Mr. Sothern and Miss Marlowe appeared on January 21, 1907, at the Lyric Theatre, in an English version of the German play of "Johannes," by Hermann Sudermann. The English version, called "John the Baptist," is comprised in six acts, and about forty persons are implicated in its colloquies. The prominent characters are John, Salome, Herodias, and Herod Antipas. Most of the essential dialogue passes among those four speakers, and all of the essential action might readily be comprised within two or three scenes. The interlocutors, in general, are explanatory feeders. Among them they contrive to make it known that Herodias, Philip's wife, has run away from Philip, with their daughter Salome, in order to marry Philip's brother, Herod, Tetrarch of Galilee, and that the Hebrew population of Jerusalem, or some part of it, led by John the Baptist, is disgusted with that matrimonial alliance and is incensed against the Tetrarch for making it. On that basis of circumstance the movement, such as it is, proceeds. It is confused and slow.

John, in particular, who thinks that he has been commissioned to regulate all things, punish all sinners, and "guide with a rod of iron,"-objects to the Tetrarch's second-hand nuptials, and, on being privily brought into the presence of Salome and Herodias, he frees his mind in explicit language, snubs the daughter,

and defies the mother: "Harlot is your name," he remarks, to Herodias, "and adulteress stands written on your forehead." One of those females, however, is secretly enamoured of John (a fact the more remarkable since, manifestly, the prophet is ignorant of the use of soap), while both are conscious of a mysterious, commanding power in him; for which reason, although Herodias nearly explodes with fury, he is allowed to depart unharmed. Soon afterward Herod and his bride appear in public, and the Hebrew mob, rallying round John, undertakes to pelt them with stones; but John, who has just heard that he ought to love his enemies, falters at the crisis, drops his missile, and is arrested and put in jail. There Salome privately visits the saint, and astounds him with such freedom of speech as might startle even a veteran sinner. "I have stolen into the twilight," says that peculiar young woman, "to seek thy face and the light of thy eyes. I have made my couch lovely with many-colored tapestries of Egypt. I have strewn it with myrtle, aloes, and cinnamon. Come, let us wait on love till the morn. My companions shall watch on the threshold, and greet the dawn with their harps." This proves to be too much for the saintly patience. "Thou art sin," says John, "go 'way!" And Salome goes-mad as a hornet, and more dangerous. That is the only really dramatic point in the play.

Intimation has been conveyed that Uncle Herod,who, like old Gobbo, "doth something smack," has cast

his thoughtful eye upon the budding charms of young Salome, and that appreciative damsel, noticing this, has caused her fond mother "grave uneasiness" by encouraging the old Tetrarch with expressive glances. The rest is easy. The two women (whether they understand each other or not, and presumably they do) now have, practically, a common ground of malevolence. Herodias beguiles Herod. A saltatory entertainment is devised. Salome demurely assumes an air of vestal innocence, the better to exert a completely infernal fascination, and the head of the unfortunate John is purchased, -according to clear denotement, with the body of that feline wench. An effort is made, incidentally, to swathe this odoriferous theme with a mystical, religious atmosphere, to make it impressive by an investiture of dusky ravines and dimly lighted wastes of barren, rocky land, and to disguise a dishevelled fabric of prurience and fanaticism by suggestion of a haunted environment. John is displayed as hearing voices and the flapping of wings, and as being forever in expectation of somebody who is "coming"-like "the Campbells" in the old song; but that extraneous embellishment is extremely thin, for John's alternations of forlorn bewilderment and rhapsodical ecstasy-intrinsically and apart from Mr. Sothern's occasionally felicitous display of them-are only suggestive of pitiable or ludicrous dementia, while, aside from two or three verbose denunciatory speeches, most of his remarks have no more relevance to the

subject of the play than those of the old woman in "David Copperfield," who, at long intervals and without ostensible reason, declares that "there's mile-stones on the Dover road."

The drift and substance, accordingly, of this repulsive drama,—which is loose in its joints and written in a flabby, disordered, moon-struck style, can be denoted in a few words. All its preparation, which is laborious, protracted, and exceedingly tiresome, leads to a situation in which a wanton woman can perform a lascivious dance, in the presence of a lewd despot, in order to inflame his passions and so entirely to enslave him that he will become a rabid monster of lust and cruelty, and, in that loathsome and frightful condition, will authorize and permit a barbarous murder, for the gratification of the woman's bloodthirsty hatred. The despot, Herod, is the old, familiar type of imperial brute with which ancient history teems. The dancing woman, Salome, is an incipient drab of the most detestable order, being not only libidinous, but ferocious, crafty, malignant, and cruel, beneath an exterior of ingenuous sweetness and girlish grace. The victim is the half-crazed fanatic, John. That crack-brained rantipole (for such he is, in the drama, and nothing else) has contemptuously repulsed the advances of the salacious Salome, and, as a consequence, has incurred her implacable resentment and hideous animosity. Salome's dance is the prelude to her demand for the head of John, served upon a