that impeccable, that only line of real poetry Alfred de Vigny ever wrote; and being a great poet Shakespeare consciously or unconsciously observed more faithfully than any other poet these principles of art; and, as is characteristic of the present day, nowhere do we find these principles so grossly violated as in the representation of his plays.  I had painful proof of this some few nights after my arrival in London.  I had never seen Shakespeare acted, and I went to the Lyceum and there I saw that exquisite love song—­for Romeo and Juliet is no more than a love song in dialogue—­tricked out in silks and carpets and illuminated building, a vulgar bawd suited to the gross passion of an ignorant public.  I hated all that with the hatred of a passionate heart, and I longed for a simple stage, a few simple indications, and the simple recitation of that story of the sacrifice of the two white souls for the reconciliation of two great families.  My hatred did not reach to the age of the man who played the boy-lover, but to the offensiveness with which he thrust his individuality upon me, longing to realize the poet’s divine imagination:  and the woman, too, I wished with my whole soul away, subtle and strange though she was, and I yearned for her part to be played by a youth as in old time:  a youth cunningly disguised, would be a symbol; and my mind would be free to imagine the divine Juliet of the poet, whereas I could but dream of the bright eyes and delicate mien and motion of the woman who had thrust herself between me and it.

But not with symbol and subtle suggestion has the villa to do, but with such stolid, intellectual fare as corresponds to its material wants.  The villa has not time to think, the villa is the working bee.  The tavern is the drone.  It has no boys to put to school, no neighbours to study, and is therefore a little more refined, or, should I say? depraved, in its taste.  The villa in one form or other has always existed, and always will exist so long as our present social system holds together.  It is the basis of life, and more important than the tavern.  Agreed:  but that does not say that the tavern was not an excellent corrective influence to the villa, and that its disappearance has not had a vulgarising effect on artistic work of all kinds, and the club has been proved impotent to replace it, the club being no more than the correlative of the villa.  Let the reader trace villa through each modern feature.  I will pass on at once to the circulating library, at once the symbol and glory of villaism.

The subject is not unfamiliar to me; I come to it like the son to his father, like the bird to its nest. (Singularly inappropriate comparison, but I am in such excellent humour to-day; humour is everything.  It is said that the tiger will sometimes play with the lamb!  Let us play.) We have the villa well in our mind.  The father who goes to the city in the morning, the grown-up girls waiting to be married,