When a fine actor does a fine thing, have we such a school of audience as to merit this admirable supply to their demands?—­this applause of their understanding?  Is there not in the whole excellent piece of work, something all too independent of their part in the theatre?

If Caligula wished that mankind had but one neck for his knife, and Byron that all womankind had but one mouth for his kiss, so the audience has conceived that all arts should have but one mystery for its blundering, and thus thinks itself interested in acting when it does but admire the actor as in a drawing.

The time may come when a national school of dramatic audience shall not accept artifices that could not convince the fool amongst them; when one brilliant moment of simplicity on the one side of the footlights shall meet a brilliant simplicity on the other.  Which troupe, which side, to begin?

TITHONUS

“It was resolved,” said the morning paper, “to colour the borders of the panels and other spaces of Portland stone with arabesques and other patterns, but that no paint should be used, as paint would need renewing from time to time.  The colours, therefore,”—­and here is the passage to be noted—­“are all mixed with wax liquefied with petroleum; and the wax surface sets as hard as marble. . .  The wax is left time to form an imperishable surface of ornament, which would have to be cut out of the stone with a chisel if it was desired to remove it.”  Not, apparently, that a new surface is formed which, by much violence and perseverance, could, years hence, be chipped off again; but that the “ornament” is driven in and incorporate, burnt in and absorbed, so that there is nothing possible to cut away by any industry.  In this humorous form of ornament we are beforehand with Posterity.  Posterity is baffled.

Will this victory over our sons’ sons be the last resolute tyranny prepared by one age for the coercion, constraint, and defeat of the future?  To impose that compulsion has been hitherto one of the strongest of human desires.  It is one, doubtless, to be outgrown by the human race; but how slowly that growth creeps onwards, let this success in the stencilling of St Paul’s teach us, to our confusion.  There is evidently a man—­a group of men—­happy at this moment because it has been possible, by great ingenuity, to force our posterity to have their cupola of St Paul’s with the stone mouldings stencilled and “picked out” with niggling colours, whether that undefended posterity like it or not.  And this is a survival of one of the obscure pleasures of man, attested by history.