Judge Bardwell Slote may be called with justice "a humorous satire," which is the subtitle given by Benjamin Woolf to the play of _The Mighty Dollar_, in which he is found. He is a politician of the worst stamp, with many amiable and commendable qualities. He is vulgar to an almost impossible degree, personally offensive, and yet entirely delightful to meet--on the stage, where Mr. Florence kept him for many hundreds of successive nights. If he never existed in real life--and it is to be hoped for the sake of our national credit that he did not--Mr. Florence made him not only possible but probable. [Illustration: JOHN T. RAYMOND.] _The Senator_, written by David Lloyd, and retouched by Sydney Rosenfeld for Wm. H. Crane, is a native legislator of a somewhat different type. He is an honest politician, who may perhaps be found in the Senate of one of the States of the nation, and even in the Upper House of the nation itself. He is a man of energy and of what is called "snap"; he is full of engagements which he has no time to keep; he is loquacious, of course, for loquacity is part of his business capital; he is loud, self-made, self-educated, self-reliant, and not always refined. His humor is peculiarly American, and in Mr. Crane's hands he is very human. Mr. Warner and Mr. Clemens, jointly with John T. Raymond, are responsible for the character of Colonel Mulberry Sellers, a stage American from the Southern States. He is quite as much exaggerated as Slote, and quite as amusing. He can be found in part in all sections of the country, perhaps, but as a whole, happily for the country, he does not exist at all, except upon the stage. The great charm of Joshua Whitcomb is that he is a real man of real New England flesh and blood, so true to the life that when Mr. Thompson took him to Keene, New Hampshire, not very far from Swanzey, his audiences wanted their money back, on the ground that they got nothing for it but what they saw, free of charge, all about them every day. "It warn't no actin'; it was jest a lot of fellers goin' around and doin' things." The manner in which Mr. Thompson goes about in _The Old Homestead_, and does things, is the perfection of art; and if he is not the best of his class, it is not because he is the least natural and the least lovable. It is a curious commentary upon the rarity of typical stage Americans of the gentler sex that only two of any prominence have appeared of late years, and that these are everything but gentle, and are both played by a man. Mrs. Barney Williams and Mrs. Florence were very popular as "Yankee gals" with a previous generation; but to Neil Burgess must we turn now for the only correct picture of the women who are fit to mate (upon the stage) with those heroes of the stage who fill our rural homesteads and our legislative lobbies. The Widow Bedott, and her friend of _The County Fair_, most assuredly are worthy of equal rights with Joshua Whitcomb and Bardwell Slote.