It is also necessary to have read the dramatic criticisms in the daily press, and to have some acquaintance with the Court management, the Stage Society, and certain unlicensed plays; and to know that Mr. Ricketts designs scenery.  This being thoroughly explained, the Curtain may rise; discovering a large Gothic Hall, decorated in the 1880 taste.  Allegories by Watts on the wall—­’Time cutting the corns of Eternity,’ ‘Love whistling down the ear of Life,’ ’Youth catching Crabs,’ &c.  Windows by Burne-Jones and Morris.  A Peacock Blue Hungarian Band playing music on Dolmetsch instruments by Purcell, Byrde, Bull, Bear, Palestrina, and Wagner, &c.  Various well-known people crowd the Stage.  Among the LIVING may be mentioned Mr. George Street; Mr. Max Beerbohm and his brother; Mr. Albert Rothenstein and his brother, &c.  The company is intellectual and artistic; not in any way smart.  The Savile and Athenaeum Clubs are well represented, but not the Garrick, the Gardenia, nor any of the establishments in the vicinity of Leicester Square.  The Princess Salome is greeting some of the arrivals—­The Warden of Keble, The President of Magdalen Coll., Oxford, and others—­who stare at her in a bewildered fashion.

THE DEVIL.  Silence, please, ladies and gentlemen, for his Excellency the Commander. (A yellowish pallor moves over the audience; effect by Gordon Craig.)

THE STATUE.  It was my intention this evening to make a few observations on flogging in the Navy, Vaccination, the Censor, Vivisection, the Fabian Society, the Royal Academy, Compound Chinese Labour, Style, Simple Prohibition, Vulgar Fractions, and other kindred subjects.  But as I opened the paper this morning, my eye caught these headlines:  ’Future of the House of Lords,’ ‘Mr. Edmund Gosse at home,’ ’The Nerves of Lord Northcliffe,’ ‘Interview with Mr. Winston Churchill,’ ’Reported Indisposition of Miss Edna May.’  A problem was thus presented to me.  Will I, shall I, ought I to speak to my friends here—­ahem!—­and elsewhere, on the subject about which they came to hear me speak. (Applause.) No.  I said; the bounders must be disappointed; otherwise they will know what to expect.  You must always surprise your audience.  When it has been advertised (sufficiently) that I am going to speak about the truth, for example, the audience comes here expecting me to speak about fiction.  The only way to surprise them is to speak the truth and that I always do.  Nothing surprises English people more than truth; they don’t like it; they don’t pay any attention to those (such as my friend Mr. H. G. Wells and myself) who trade in truth; but they listen and go away saying, ‘How very whimsical and paradoxical it all is,’ and ’What a clever adventurer the fellow is, to be sure.’  ’That was a good joke about duty and beauty being the same thing’—­that was a joke I did not make.  It is not my kind of joke—­but when people begin ascribing to you the jokes of other people, you become a living—­I was going to say statue—­but I mean a living classic.