The old house of Molière is, like the Academy, a permanent attraction of Paris. It stands in the Rue de Richelieu, on a Place of its own, a light, animated, illuminated Place, dominated by the columns of the Théâtre Français. This was established here after the Revolution, and, thanks to the famous Decree of Moscow, its name is almost as eternally linked with that of Napoleon as with those of the immortal Molière and of Louis XIV., a more liberal but not less exacting master of France than the Corsican adventurer. There is not a civilised land that has not something to learn of other lands. While the French may well envy the more stable and self-respecting government of England, England might just as well borrow something of France; and one of the things it ought to envy is the establishment, two centuries ago, of a national theatre. The result for France has been the most perfect dramatic school of the world. The suppression of excessive individuality is a benefit to the entire company, as it forbids any ambition to “star.” We have seen what the star system has done for the two great artists who broke away from its traditions to amass fortunes and fling their reputations to all the quarters of the globe. South America has had the privilege of hearing Sarah Bernhardt, but the artist who left the Théâtre Français had genius of a finer quality and theatrical cultivation of a higher order than those displayed to-day by this extraordinary woman in the various more or less mediocre plays she acts in, often without a single other actor or actress worth listening to. The starring system is essentially the development of all that is worst in the artist—vulgarity, crude bids for personal popularity, blighting vanity, and egotism; in a word, all the cheapest characteristics of the charlatan. It is precisely these ugly defects that such an institution as the Comédie Française tends to suppress. There the reputation of the company and not of the individual is at stake. Minor parts are played by eminent artists, and the excessive vanity and pretension of the one become the plague of the many. I will not advance the assertion that everybody in the famous company of the Comédie Française is equally admirable. Temperament will, of course, prompt your criticism. For instance, Mounet-Sully is the beloved of many a nation as well as of thousands of his own countrymen, and I can scarcely listen to Mounet-Sully with patience. A greater bore I cannot conceive. He belongs to the Byronic school, the days of cloaked and sabred romance. His sombre voice lifts itself on a volume of sound, and is flung in mournful and passionate reproach against the implacable walls of destiny. But yet in your most exasperated mood, with nerves on edge from his excess of clouded despair and desperate anguish, you must admit that the man is a perfect artist, and that such a temperament starring about the globe, without the control of the company to which he belongs, would drift into