the season I
would select for the chase, but then I know more about flowers than I do
about foxes, and like them much better. If the critic was right, either
the roses must wither or Squire Thornhill must change his coat. A more
serious objection may be brought against the division of the last act
into three scenes. There, I think, there was a distinct dramatic loss.
The room to which Olivia returns should have been exactly the same room
she had left. As a picture of the eighteenth century, however, the whole
production was admirable, and the details, both of acting and of mise-en-
scene, wonderfully perfect. I wish Olivia would take off her pretty
mittens when her fortune is being told. Cheiromancy is a science which
deals almost entirely with the lines on the palm of the hand, and mittens
would seriously interfere with its mysticism. Still, when all is said,
how easily does this lovely play, this artistic presentation, survive
criticisms founded on cheiromancy and cub-hunting! The Lyceum under Mr.
Irving's management has become a centre of art. We are all of us in his
debt. I trust that we may see some more plays by living dramatists
produced at his theatre, for Olivia has been exquisitely mounted and
exquisitely played.

AS YOU LIKE IT AT COOMBE HOUSE

(Dramatic Review, June 6, 1885.)

In Theophile Gautier's first novel, that golden book of spirit and sense,
that holy writ of beauty, there is a most fascinating account of an
amateur performance of As You Like It in the large orangery of a French
country house. Yet, lovely as Gautier's description is, the real
presentation of the play last week at Coombe seemed to me lovelier still,
for not merely were there present in it all those elements of poetry and
picturesqueness which le maitre impeccable so desired, but to them was
added also the exquisite charm of the open woodland and the delightful
freedom of the open air. Nor indeed could the Pastoral Players have made
a more fortunate selection of a play. A tragedy under the same
conditions would have been impossible. For tragedy is the exaggeration
of the individual, and nature thinks nothing of dwarfing a hero by a
holly bush, and reducing a heroine to a mere effect of colour. The
subtleties also of facial expression are in the open air almost entirely
lost; and while this would be a serious defect in the presentation of a
play which deals immediately with psychology, in the case of a comedy,