ditious courage and promptitude of that outlaw (unrecognized by her as such), and on seeing each other they become lovers. She conceals him in her dwelling, when, wounded and almost dying, he has made his way through a cordon of enemies, and for many days she tends him, till his wounds are healed, and then, for a time, those lovers are happy, in their secret love. She is, however, compromised by this indiscretion, and when presently her father, Prince Saigon, discovers her secret, and, as he thinks, her dishonor, she is declared an outcast, and her lover is doomed to torture and death. She then learns that she can insure that lover's pardon and liberation by betraying the hidingplace of his outlaw followers, and, in desperate agony, she betrays them: but she gains nothing by that action except an access of misery. Prince Kara, having, with a few of his outlawed followers, fought his way through the lines of his enemies, and discovered that the secret of the hiding-place, confided by him to Yo-San, has been by her revealed, commits suicide, in the honorable Japanese manner, and she is left alone, with only his forgiveness as a comfort, and with the hope that, after a thousand years of loneliness and grief, in the underworld of shadows, she will be again united with him in the eternal happiness of heaven. The play shows Yo-San as an innocent, confiding, pathetic figure, amid stormy vicissitudes and afflicting trials, and leaves her, at the last, redeemed and transfigured, on the verge of Para

dise, where Kara stretches out his arms to embrace her, and where there is neither trouble, nor parting, nor sorrow any more.

The experience of the Japanese girl is the old ordeal, over again, of woman's sacrifice and anguish, when giving all for love. Something of Shakespeare's Juliet is in that heroine, something of Goethe's Margaret, something of the many passionate, wayward, mournfully beautiful ideals of woman's sacrifice that are immortal in story and song. She is a loving and sorrowing woman, true, tender, faithful forever, and celestial alike in her love and her grief. The character of Yo-San combines some of the finest components of womanhood and exemplifies virtues such as, indeed, redeem the frailty of human nature-purity of heart and life, true love, endurance, heroism of conduct, and devoted integrity of spiritual faith. Blanche Bates gained the greatest success of her professional career by her impersonation of Yo-San. She was an entirely lovely image of ardent, innocent, ingenuous, noble womanhood-such an image as irresistibly allured by the charm of blended physical and spiritual beauty, bewitched by piquant simplicity, thrilled the imagination by an impartment of passionate vitality, and by its exemplification of eternal constancy in love, the immortal fidelity of the spirit, captured the heart. Her facility of action and fluency of expression were continuously spontaneous, and she was delightful both

to see and to hear. Such an achievement in the dramatic art vindicates the beneficent utility of the Theatre, because it cheers and ennobles, and thus practically helps society, through the ministration of beauty. This is a hard world. Almost everybody in it struggles beneath burdens of care and sorrow. Multitudes of human beings dwell in trouble and suffering. An imperative need of our race is the strength of patience and the light of hope. Dramatic art, or any art, which satisfies that need, or even remotely helps to satisfy it, is a blessing. The rest is little, if at all, better than a curse.

The acting of Blanche Bates, which, from the first of her performances on the New York Stage, had shown a charming wildness and freedom, was, in Yo-San, more unconventional than ever. Her appearance was beautiful, her action graceful, alert, vigorous, and free from all restraint of self-consciousness and finical prudery. There was no ostentation in it, no parade, no assumption of the moral crank, such as, at one time, there had been reason to apprehend through her temporary association with some of the crankdramas, no pulpiteer impartment of stuffy didacticism. She came in a dreary time of "problems," "sermons,' "arguments," "symbols," and the flatulent nonsense of scissorized novels and dirty farce, and she came as a relief and a blessing the authentic representative of youth, health, strength, love, and hope.

There is one moment in "The Darling of the Gods"

when suspense is wrought to a point of intense tension, and when the inherent, essential faculty of the actor, the power to reveal almost in a flash the feeling of the heart and the working of the mind, is imperatively required. Kara, wounded, exhausted, desperate, has sought refuge in the dwelling of the Princess Yo-San and, by her, has been succored and concealed. Migaku, the Shadow, a spy of the terrible War Minister, Zakuri, has traced him to that refuge, but a devoted guardian of Yo-San, Inu, a Corean giant, has detected the presence of the spy, has seized and slain him, and has hidden the dead body in a stream. Zakuri and the father of Yo-San follow the spy, and come to the dwelling of Yo-San. Zaruki wishes that it be searched, but he agrees to accept her oath, if she will give it, that she knows nothing of the whereabouts of Kara. The Princess is summoned and, denying the presence of Kara, is required, by her father, to swear that she has spoken the truth. Words can faintly indicate the beauty of the picture and action which follow, as the girl seeks to protect her lover. The time is night. The scene is a strange, fantastic, fairy-like garden, of old Japan, a bower of flowers, with twining wistaria wreathing the trees and house, and far, far off, visible in the silver moonlight, a great snow-capped volcano, the peak of which is touched with ruddy light. The father and the dreaded Minister of War stand before the door. Miss Bates, as Yo-San, stood a little above them, dressed