When he went to Victorien Sardou for a new play and got _Robespierre_, Irving got the worst thing that he had produced up to that date; but when he went a second time and got _Dante_, he got something worse still. Sir Arthur Pinero's letter acknowledging the debt incurred by the dramatists of England to M. Sardou for showing them how a play should be written was a masterpiece of irony. The truth is that Irving was the greatest of English actors, and he was at his best only when he was interpreting the best. When he was acting Shakespeare he was supreme. In scenes of passion he differed from most actors. They could show a passion in the hands of a man, he showed the man in the hands of a passion. And what actor could have represented Corporal Brewster in _Waterloo_ as Irving did? About the changes that we veterans have seen in the stage during the forty years of our playgoing, we agree that one of the most remarkable is the introduction of parsons and pyjamas, and of persons with a past. All these glories of the modern theatre were shut out from the theatres of forty years ago. When an adaptation of _Dora_ by the author of _Fedora_ and _Theodora_ was made for the English stage under the name of _Diplomacy_, the claim that the Countess with a past had upon the Diplomatist who is going to marry--really marry--another woman, was turned into a claim that she had “nursed him through a long illness.” The censor of those days thought that that was quite as far as any one should go in that direction. It was assumed that _La Dame aux Camélias_ could never be adapted without being offensive to a pure-minded English audience. I think that _A Clerical Error_ was the first play in which a clergyman of the Church of England was given the entrée to a theatre in London. To be sure, there were priests of the Church of Rome in Dion Roufcicault's Irish plays, but they were not supposed to count. I heard that Mr. Pigott, the Censor, only passed the parson in _A Clerical Error_ on the plea of the young nurse for something equally forbidden, in _Midshipman Easy_, that “it was a very little one.” But from that day until now we have had parsons by the score, ladies wearing camellias and little else, by the hundred. As for the pyjama drama, I don't suppose that any manager would so much as read a play that had not this duplex garment in one scene. I will confess that I once wrote a story for _Punch_ with a pyjama chorus in it. If it was from this indiscretion that a manager conceived the idea of a ballet founded on the same costume I have something to answer for. But in journalism and literature a corresponding change has come about, only more recently. It is not more than ten or twelve years since certain words have enjoyed the liberty of the press. In a police-court case the word that the ruffian in the dock hurled at a policeman was represented thus--“d----n,” telling him to go to “h----” no respectable newspaper would ever put in the final letter.