and in which Miss Marlowe acted the heroine not as an old woman, but as an enthusiastic, lovely girl.

The play is simpleness itself, except for a forced and artificial close. In Act First Barbara trifles a little with her lover, and promises to marry him, against her father's command. In Act Second she tries to make a runaway match with him, but is prevented by the tardiness of the clergyman; and she shoots and disables a soldier who is about to kill him. In Act Third she harbors him in her father's home, mortally wounded, and by her pathetic appeals and adroit management protects him from further injury. In Act Fourth, after watching all night at his chamber door, she enters the room to find him dead, and she takes a wild, despairing leave of his corpse, and repairs to a balcony, there to wave the Star-spangled Banner in the faces of her triumphant countrymen, then in arms against it, and as she does this she falls dead,-being shot by an enraged, jealous, half-crazed suitor, whose military father promptly orders the assassin to be slain. Those incidents do not bear the test of common-sense, but they are ingeniously arranged, and they are so displayed as to cause cumulative theatrical effect.

There is a touch of silliness at the beginning. The Southern character, as denoted in the two fathers, has been somewhat coarsened, for the sake of patriotic point. The ethics are mixed. A Union officer, in Act First, is made to lie, in order to connive at the escape

of a fugitive Confederate, of whose identity he is aware and with whose place of concealment he is acquainted. A Southern girl is made to promise marriage to a Northern officer, while yet the war is raging around her home. Those devices are irrational, and so is the abrupt introduction of the flag episode immediately after the deathbed, so harshly irrational as to seem preposterous. The play was acted with exceptional ability, in most of the nineteen characters that are implicated in it. Miss Marlowe involuntarily manifested far greater dramatic powers than were essential for the elucidation of anything in the play. Her management of a colloquy of sentiment, in the First Act, was delicious. She was by turns arch, capricious, tender, passionate, and almost tragically strong. Her utterance of Barbara's appeal to her father, for her wounded lover's life, was spoken with exquisite beauty, and her expression of the frenzy of grief, on finding him dead, reached as great a height as is possible to spoken pathos: for the deepest sorrow is silent; it does not talk, and certainly it does not wave flags and deliver speeches from balconies.

"WHEN KNIGHTHOOD WAS IN FLOWER."

Miss Marlowe acted Mary Tudor, in a play entitled "When Knighthood Was In Flower," at the Criterion Theatre, on January 14, 1901. That play is a synopsis of a crude and cumbersome novel,-a book not easily

read, because of its disjointed mechanism and its forced, artificial, bald, inflexible style, but one that has the merit of relevance to an unhackneyed historical theme, and one that contains several well contrived, striking romantic incidents. The heroine is the Princess Mary, sister of King Henry the Eighth of England. The hero is one of that monarch's favorites, Charles Brandon, Viscount of Lisle, who, after the Battle of Flodden (1514), was made Duke of Suffolk, and who privately espoused the Princess, in Paris, after the death of her husband, King Louis the Twelfth of France. There is a slight basis of fact for the play, but, practically, and this is a merit,—its story is a fabric of fiction.

Suffolk and Mary Tudor had been lovers; both of them were remarkable for personal beauty; King Henry the Eighth had, at one time, favored a project of their marriage; the marriage of the Princess to the French King was one of mercenary policy, prompted by the subtle counsel of the Duke of Longueville; the French King was prematurely old and infirm, so that he died, aged 53, within less than three months after his wedding; Suffolk was an accomplished courtier and soldier; and King Henry was mollified as to his sister's secret marriage, in part by the persuasions of Cardinal Wolsey, and made to receive Suffolk and his bride and to establish them happily in an English home. The private marriage of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor occurred in 1515. Mary died in 1534, at the age of thirty-seven;