ou will understand
why. There were episodes in "The School for Husbands" that were very
clever and enlivening. All the characters were puppets, but they
danced with the latest electric improvements, and their gyrations
entertained. Blood they certainly lacked, but nobody cared. It was a
relief to watch this amusing but thoroughly refined tomfoolery, and to
know that no problem lurked beneath it. It was the Eden Musee,
suddenly galvanized into life and pirouetting in all its color and
brilliancy.

With Arthur Forrest, who is a fine, distinguished, subtle, convincing
actor; with Miss Grace Filkins, Jameson Lee Finney and Mrs. Ida
Jeffreys-Goodfriend, Miss Fischer managed to beat any
"all-star-cast"--the refuge of the destitute. The star herself was so
irresistible, so dominant and so largely vital, that hundreds of
people who had merely heard of Alice Fischer were glad to meet her.
This "venture" firmly established her, and the establishment was
conducted by such legitimate means that the event was unusually
interesting.

Oh, I'm tired of stars. I am--I am! Last month I devoted myself almost
exclusively to them, and now I find that the cry is still "they come,
they come!" To be sure, Miss Marie Tempest and Miss Alice Fischer both
achieved success, but now I see before me the plaintive figure of poor
little Miss Annie Russell, who didn't. Miss Russell came to the
Criterion Theater with a Zangwill play. It sounds well, doesn't
it?--but I can assure you that the sound was most misleading.

Nothing quite so drab, so despondently dreary, or so damply dismal as
"Jinny the Carrier" ever asked for a hearing and got it. Zangwill has
lectured upon the drama, and paid pungent respect to its
incongruities, but he has proved himself to be infinitely worse than
the various playwrights whom he ridiculed. "The Serio-Comic
Governess," thrust upon Miss Cecilia Loftus, was bad enough, but
"Jinny the Carrier" went far below it, and stayed there all the time.

It was an "idyll" of Frog Farm, near London, and Frog Farm seemed to
be a trifle less amusing than Hunter's Point, near New York. It
introduced us to rural types of deadly monotony, among them being a
"village patriarch," suggesting cheap melodrama; a veterinary surgeon,
a postman, a village dressmaker and _Jinny_ herself, who "ran" a
wagon, and who subsequently fell in love with a rival who tried to
drive her out of the business. There were four acts of cumulative
hopelessness, a