little more than the task-work of the two well-trained play-makers: it was sufficient for its purpose, no more and no less. Of all the opera-books of MM. Meilhac and Halevy, that one is easily first and foremost which has for its heroine the Helen of Troy whom Marlowe's Faustus declared Fairer than the evening air, Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. In the _Belle Helene_ we see the higher wit of M. Meilhac. M. Halevy had been at the same college with him, and they had pored together over the same legends of old time, but working without M. Meilhac on _Orphee aux Enfers_, M. Halevy showed his inferiority, for _Orphee_ is the old-fashioned anachronistic skit on antiquity--funny if you will, but with a fun often labored, not to say forced--the fun of physical incongruity and exaggeration. But in the _Belle Helene_ the fun, easy and flowing, is of a very high quality, and it has root in mental, not physical, incongruity. Here indeed is the humorous touchstone of a whole system of government and of theology. And, allowing for the variations made with comic intent, it is altogether Greek in spirit--so Greek, in fact, that I doubt whether any one who has not given his days and nights to the study of Homer and of the tragedians, and who has not thus taken in by the pores the subtle essence of Hellenic life and literature, can truly appreciate this French farce. Planche's _Golden Fleece_ is in the same vein, but the ore is not as rich. Frere's _Loves of the Triangles_ and some of his _Anti-Jacobin_ writing are perhaps as good in quality, but the subjects are inferior and temporary. Scarron's vulgar burlesques and the cheap parodies of many contemporary English play-makers are not to be mentioned in the same breath with this scholarly fooling. There is something in the French genius akin to the Greek, and here was a Gallic wit who could turn a Hellenic love-tale inside out, and wring the uttermost drop of fun from it without recourse to the devices of the booth at the fair, the false nose and the simulation of needless ugliness. The French play, comic as it was, did not suggest hysteria or epilepsy, and it was not so lacking in grace that we could not recall the original story without a shudder. There is no shattering of an ideal, and one cannot reproach the authors of the _Belle Helene_ with what Theophrastus Such calls "debasing the moral currency, lowering the value of every inspiring fact and tradition."