These newspaper notices are sometimes careless, they are sometimes perfunctory, and they are sometimes cruel; and occasionally they are careful, conscientious, and clever, done with a dexterity worthy of high praise when we consider all the conditions under which it is displayed. But even at its best, play-reviewing cannot attain to the level of true dramatic criticism, more leisurely in its composition, larger in its scope, and more discriminating in its choice of topic. The play-reviewing of the daily journal is akin in aim to the book-reviewing, which has for its purpose the swift consideration of the volume in vogue at the moment. In our morning and evening papers the book-reviewing and the play-reviewing are both of them necessarily up-to-date, in fact, up-to-the-last-minute. To be contemporaneous, instantly and necessarily and inexorably, is their special quality and their immediate purpose; it is the reason for their existence and the excuse for their being. II Here it may be well to cite again the oft-quoted confession of the late Jules Lemaître, writer of volume after volume in which he discussed the leading men of letters of his own time and of his own country: "Criticism of our contemporaries is not criticism--it is conversation." Now, conversation may be a very good thing; indeed, when it is as clear and as sparkling as was Lemaître's, it is an excellent thing; yet he was right in admitting that it is not criticism, since it could not but lack the touchstone of time, the perspective of distance, the assured application of the eternal standards. And play-reviewing, like book-reviewing, cannot be anything but conversation about our contemporaries. It may descend to chaff-like chatter about the writers of the hour and to empty gossip about their sayings and doings; or it may have the sterner merits of brilliant conversation at its best. But it is not really criticism in the finer sense of the word; it cannot be; and one may go further and say that it ought not to be, since true criticism is more or less out of place in a newspaper--because the direct object of a newspaper is to present the news, with only the swiftest of commentaries thereon.