which reminds you of a broken-winded barrel-organ playing a, che la morte, bad enough in prose, but when set up in blank verse awful and shocking in its more than natural deformity—­but bright quips and cracks fresh from the back-yard of the slum where the linen is drying, or the “pub” where the unfortunate wife has just received a black eye that will last her a week.  That inimitable artist, Bessie Bellwood, whose native wit is so curiously accentuated that it is sublimated, that it is no longer repellent vulgarity but art, choice and rare—­see, here she comes with “What cheer, Rea; Rea’s on the job.”  The sketch is slight, but is welcome and refreshing after the eternal drawing-room and Mrs. Kendal’s cumbrous domesticity; it is curious, quaint, perverted, and are not these the aions and the attributes of art?  Now see that perfect comedian, Arthur Roberts, superior to Irving because he is working with living material; how trim and saucy he is! and how he evokes the soul, the brandy-and-soda soul, of the young men, delightful and elegant in black and white, who are so vociferously cheering him, “Will you stand me a cab-fare, ducky, I am feeling so awfully queer?” The soul, the spirit, the entity of Piccadilly Circus is in the words, and the scene the comedian’s eyes—­each look is full of suggestion; it is irritating, it is magnetic, it is symbolic, it is art.

Not art, but a sign, a presentiment of an art, that may grow from the present seeds, that may rise into some stately and unpremeditated efflorescence, as the rhapsodist rose to Sophocles, as the miracle play rose through Peele and Nash to Marlowe, hence to the wondrous summer of Shakespeare, to die later on in the mist and yellow and brown of the autumn of Crowes and Davenants.  I have seen music-hall sketches, comic interludes that in their unexpectedness and naive naturalness remind me of the comic passages in Marlowe’s Faustus, I waited (I admit in vain) for some beautiful phantom to appear, and to hear an enthusiastic worshipper cry out in his agony:—­

    “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
    And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? 
    Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. 
    Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies! 
    Come, Helen, come; give me my soul again. 
    Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
    And all is dross that is not Helena.”

And then the astonishing change of key:—­

    “I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
    Instead of Troy shall Wurtemberg be sacked,” etc.