... . There seems no real reason why Baron Golosh should not have been a truly comical opera-bouffe. The humours of the parvenu are by no means exhausted, though they have been drawn upon since the beginning of drama. Unfortunately the adapter has been content to deal with the humours already handled, and the result is that one has a painful feeling of old acquaintance with the jokes. ...

... . BY DOROTHY LOWNDES. The butler had just announced Mr. Hervey, and then retired with courteous resentment of having been called up to admit so frequent a visitor. Dulcie threw down her book, and came forward to meet him before be could cross the room. Why, Dal, this is fortunate I was dying for someone to talk to, she said. Take that chair there. Take care don't sit on Dodo.' I have thrown ...

... .* We were all complaining a few weeks ago because Mr. Andrew Lang bad given us a true story-book. Truth is all very well, and is easy, as the venerable Abraham Coles told us; but Mr. Oscar Wilde and the souls have led us away from the odium mendacis, so that the best appraised virtue of the moment is the virtue of lying. This is perfectly fit and proper, for if superstition were taken from ...

... . The Ben Greet Comedy Company, which now includes Mr. Henry B. Irving (Sir Henry s elder son) as leading man, occupied the boards of the Richmond Theatre for three nights in last week, appearing in Masks and Faces, Money, and The Lady of Lyons. Notwithstanding the mark that Mr. Irving has already made on the Metropolitan stage by his performances in A Fool's Paradise, at the Garrick ...

... .* It is a far cry from the Gipsies to Mr. Francis Galton, but there is something in common between them. As out of astrology was born astronomy, and as chemistry is the offspring of alchemy, so is the science of finger-prints the descendant of palmistry. In the lines of the hand the soothsayers of Chaldæa read the fate, fortunes, and character of men. The Greeks practised the art, even ...

... .* The title of this book may be a little alarming to the nervous man who has read many novels lately in which life is represented as a flaming pathway of woman's vengeance for centuries of subjection, and in which he has stumbled in every page over the grisly, mouldering hones of man's fallen supremacy. The modern woman in Miss Dixon's story is not the aggressive champion of her sex, chanting ...

... . We are getting on in departmental fiction. Not only is Scotland so finely apportioned between the leading Scotch novelists that a brawl between them on the score of territorial boundary might he a distraction any day, but the ''common lands of this country are now wonderfully few. The prospect for the unborn novelist is not reassuring. It is possible that one of his first acts on coming to ...

... NOTES FEOM THE THEATEES. When it is stated that one of the chief points in The Chinaman is the jealousy of a man because he thinks that his wife's innocent attentions to her brother are guilty favours to a stranger, and that another is the successful endeavour of the hero to pass himself off as a Chinese mandarin at a moment's notice, though he knows nothing of the land or language, the ...

... .* We should nave pronounced The Fiddler of Carne a thing of-- Fantastic beauty; such as lurks In some wild poet, when he works Without a conscience or an aim, but for its dedication. There we are initiated into its inner meaning as a fable of the disturbing effect of the appearance of a self-absorbed artist in a matter-of-fact and half-civilised community, ''teaching it strange lore; the ...

... A MODERN I'EPYS. The memoir-writer is coming to be known and dreaded as a literary dynamitard, whose bomb may at any moment explode to the destruction of established reputations or institutions. Upon the publication of the Greville Memoirs, the Queen, as we read in Mr. Knox Laughton's memoir of their editor, Henry Reeve, sent him a message expressing her disapproval of then- appearance, as ...

... . The opera is well within sight of the end. The most notable feature of the past week was the performance of ltomeo et Juliette at Windsor, when the Queen had the opportunity of seeing the new tenor, M. Saleza, who has created a furore this season. Born and bred at Bruges, he is only thirty. In September 1886 he entered the Paris Conservatoire, and in June 1888 he graduated thence with the ...

... . Novels with literary and artistic heroines are becoming all too common. In these days of keen competition in subjects and motives, it seems an easy and convenient way, no doubt, of making a hero or heroine interesting to endow them with fine intellects and the gift of sublime visions. It is certainly a capital way of using up the writer's waste material in the way of plans, plots, and ...