posed to take place in 1919, but
its atmosphere was clearly ante-bellum. Anyhow there was no sign of the
alleged damage done to our moral standards by the War. But nobody will
quarrel on that ground with Mr. BESIER and Miss EDGINTON, the clever
authors of this very interesting play. And if we have to be taught how to
behave by a Frenchman, to the detriment of our British _amour propre_,
there is nobody who can do it so nicely and painlessly as Mr. DU MAURIER.

"WEDDING BELLS."

I begin to suspect that the possible situations of marital farce are
becoming exhausted. Certainly we have lost the power of being staggered by
the emergence of an old wife out of the past. But Mr. SALISBURY FIELD, who
wrote _Wedding Bells_ for America, is not content with a single repetition
of this ancient device; he must needs give us these intrusions in
triplicate, showing how they affect the career of (1) the hero, (2) his
man-servant, (3) a poet-friend. True he only produces two old wives; but
one of them, being a bigamist, was able to intrude "in two places" (as the
auctioneers say).

The wife of _Reginald Carter_ (Mr. OWEN NARES), having first run right away
from him and then apparently divorced him for desertion (I told you the
play was American), turns up on the eve of his marriage to another. He has
barely recovered from his failure to keep his future wife in ignorance of
his past when he has to start taxing his brains all over again in order to
keep his past wife in ignorance of his future.

The First Act went well enough and was full of good words--not very subtle
perhaps, but the kind that invites intelligent laughter. Later the play
degenerated into something too improbable for comedy and not boisterous
enough for pure farce. The two most disintegrating elements were furnished
by a love-sick poet (a figure that should have been _vieux jeu_ in the last
century) and an English maid who could never have existed outside the
imagination of an American. I make no complaint of the fact that in a
chequered past she had married both _Carter's_ man-servant and the
antiquated poet; but I do complain that her Cockney accent was imperfectly
consistent both with her rustic origin an apple-cheeked lass, we were told,
from somewhere in Kent) and her situation as maid to a very smart American.

You will naturally ask what Mr. OWEN NARES was doing in this galley; and I
cannot tell you. I can only say that he was very brave about it all. In a
sen