here is a true companionship of hearts. Unfortunately
the effect of this passage was a little spoilt by what had just gone
before--a rather slow and superfluous scene with the village idiot--and
some of the audience imagined that the author was still marking time.

Mr. MILNE has an individual manner so distinct that he can well afford
to acknowledge his debt to Sir JAMES BARRIE. As in _Mary Rose_, so here
(though there are no supernatural forces at work) we have the sharp
contrast between commonplace life, as lived by the rest, and the life of
Fairyland, as coming within the vision of one only. And we were reminded
too of the Midsummer-madness that overtook the company in _Dear Brutus_.
I won't say that it wasn't natural enough for _Melisande_, under the
fascination of a moonlit Midsummer Eve, to imagine, when she chanced
upon a gentleman in fancy dress of the right period, that at last she
had realised her dream of a hero of romance; but she was stark
Midsummer-mad to suppose, when she met him early next morning with his
costume unchanged, that he would keep it on till he came to tea with the
family, and then, still wearing it, waft her off to Faerie.

But not even BARRIE has ever made a better scene than that which showed
us the disillusionment of the visionary when she is confronted with her
blue-and-gold hero of romance now transformed into a plain Stock
Exchange man, his air of banality enhanced by the last word in golf
suitings. The humour of this scene, in which she made conventional
conversation without any real effort to conceal her sense of the bathos
of the situation, was very perfect. The relatively simple humour of the
match-making mother--not so simple, all the same, as its spontaneity
made it appear--had the distinction which one expects of Mr. MILNE; but
this was far the funniest feature in the play.

It would have been an easy matter to make cheap fun, as MARK TWAIN did
in _A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur_, out of the popular view of
the Age of Romance, but A. A. M. avoided that obvious lure. Indeed, in
his natural anxiety not to be taken too seriously in his first attempt
to be serious, he rather tended to make light of his own theory of
modern romance, laying a little too much stress at the end on the
culinary aspect of conjugal felicity.

I am not sure that Mr. ARTHUR WONTNER (to whom my best wishes for his
new managership) quite realised, in his doublet and long hose, my idea
of a figure of