The fundamental principles which Robert-Houdin accepted and which he seems to have taken over from Torrini, Messrs. Maskelyne and Devant have elucidated in their philosophic disquisition, and yet in one particular their practise is not yet level with their preaching. Before Robert-Houdin and Frikell, or at least before Torrini, and even after these three artists had set a better example, the majority of conjurers filled the stage with gaudy apparatus and insisted on its blazing with an unnecessary prodigality of lights. One magician in the middle of the nineteenth century came forward on a stage absolutely dark, and suddenly fired a pistol, thereby lighting two hundred candles arranged in pyramids behind him. Another hung his stage with black velvet and adorned it with skulls. Torrini and Robert-Houdin made an approach to the unadorned simplicity of an actual drawing-room, altho Robert-Houdin seems to have permitted himself a long shelf at the back of his stage on which his various automatic figures were assembled awaiting their summons to take part in the program. Even Messrs. Maskelyne and Devant are satisfied with a stage-setting which is frankly only a stage-setting--as stagy, in fact, as the ordinary scenery to be seen in a variety-show. Now, it may be admitted that a nondescript set of this sort, vaguely Oriental, with arches and curtains, and somewhat suggestive of comic opera, may not be inappropriate when any one of the bolder illusions is to be presented--the Box Trick or the Aerial Suspension, the Mystic Cabinet or the Talking Sphinx. Indeed, a special set of scenery is often actually necessary for the presentation of marvels depending mainly on optics or mechanics. But for the first part of the program, when the performer appears in ordinary evening-dress, and when he is presenting himself as a gentleman in a drawing-room, amusing other gentlemen, by means of experiments in magic, every one of which may be likened to a little play, why should not the stage-set be that of a drawing-room, or of a bachelor's study, as accurately reproduced as similar rooms are reproduced in the modern comedies of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and Mr. Augustus Thomas? The set accepted by Messrs. Maskelyne and Devant is devoid of the actuality of a real room; it is fantastically stagy, and therefore it lacks both veracity and dignity.