iety plays. The recipe for these is different from the
gallon of gore and the ton of thunder which make up the other sort. You
must have your actors representing people who are always bored to death,
if you wish to maintain the respect and patronage of a society audience,
whose ambition is to seem to be always bored to death in real life. You
must have what the sweet but-not exemplary SWINBURNE calls "the lilies
and languors of virtue" at WALLACK'S, to balance "the raptures and roses
of vice" which you get at the sensational shops. People may fall in
love, in a mild way, as they do in society, but they must not undergo
the ravages of that passion, as it is exhibited out of society. They
are, so to speak, vaccinated for love, and they are safe from the
virulent confluent or even the varioloid type of the original malady.
They may also transact business, of a high-toned sort, and sometimes
they get out of temper. But their main employment is to wander about and
yawn, or to sit down and sneer.

There is a laborious lunatic who makes ice at the fair of the American
Institute, with the thermometer at 80 deg. or so in the shade. (Note to
Editor.--I don't know the man from ADAM, and have received no
consideration from him whatever for this allusion,) I believe his ice
costs this ingenious individual about four dollars per pound to
make--but no matter. Well, this is exactly the trick by which you make
society plays. ROBERTSON does it to perfection. He is the patent
refrigerator. And the man who did "The Two Roses" has plagiarized his
process and reproduced his results. I don't know whether the idea is to
interest people in what is uninteresting, or to uninterest people in
what is interesting. But he does both.

Perhaps, however, some absurd person would like to know something about
this play. There is a commercial traveller in it, who is taken,
by-the-by, bodily and even to his checked trousers, out of one of
ROBERTSON'S plays. The only addition that has been made is that this one
swears. But then STODDART personates him. This commercial traveller has
a wife. To whom, by-the-by, did it ever occur, before the author of this
play, that commercial travellers could have wives? The wife of this
itinerant commercial person is a stationary commercial person, who keeps
a boarding-house which the youths, the heroes of the play, have the
misery to inhabit. All this is undeniably low for WALLACK'S, and the
sales-ladies in the audience ex