ter--even a miss. The signaller must needs
be more dismayed than he. "Q" is also too honest and perceptive a critic
not to see the weak points of _The Mayor of Troy_ as a stage play,
though he may fairly plume himself on the pleasant (and unpleasant) folk
of his creation who partly came to life on the opening night at the
Haymarket. He will have found out and noted for an appendix to those
lively and instructive discourses of his _On the Art of Writing_ that it
is a jolly difficult thing to write a play; that an act is not a chapter
of a novel, still less a _compote_ of bits of many chapters; that, while
to be charmingly discursive is a paramount quality of the higher type of
novelist, the same attribute in a play, whose very breath of life is
essential brevity, makes it appear to go on crutches, like his own
discomfited hero. It bemuses an audience and gravels the players--as the
queer uncertainty of touch of so skilful, so conscientious an actor as
Mr. AINLEY sufficiently betrayed. But to the story.

[Illustration: CURED OF OBESITY IN TEN YEARS.

_The Mayor of Troy (Mr. Henry Ainley) before and after prison diet._]

Portly and pompous _Major Solomon Hymen Toogood_ (Mr. AINLEY), wealthy
citizen of Troy Town, and, in the perilous year of grace 1804, for the
seventh time its Mayor; Justice of the Peace, in command of the battery
of _Diehards_ which himself had raised, spoilt by the worship of the
women and the tractability (with reservations) of the men, has reason to
be mightily pleased with himself; and very distinctly is. On this
pleasant day on which the play opens he has written a proposal of
marriage to a lady whose heart, unhappily, is already given to his
Deputy in civic office and Second in Command of the battery, Dr.
_Dillworthy_ (Mr. LEON QUARTERMAINE). Meanwhile a little smuggling
expedition, which he had planned under cover of his military authority
(Sir ARTHUR does not quite put it like that), turns into a genuine
fight, and our Mayor is carried off prisoner to France.

At the peace of 1814 he returns thin and lame to find that the lady of
his choice has long married the man of hers (and why not?), and that the
two, with their children, are installed in his house; _Dillworthy_ no
longer Deputy but reigning Mayor. Nobody recognises the famous
_Toogood_, which is entirely "Q's" fault, not theirs; and nobody, except
a pretty maid who is to marry his nephew (his own money has made the
match possible), seems