Not so long ago an operetta was licensed in which ministers of religion were held up to ridicule, and jokes were freely made concerning matters that must by a great portion of the audience have been held sacred, and yet nothing was said. But should some manager think of producing an episode culled from the Old Testament, and treated in a strictly serious and even reverent manner, the British conscience, that article of home manufacture of which Englishmen are so proud, is at once up in arms. We cannot support too many music-halls or give too much encouragement to those bastard specimens of operatic music known as "original" (?) comic operas, but our feelings of propriety revolt against anything like the stage treatment of works founded upon Biblical subjects. Let us be consistent whilst we are about it. If it is wrong to introduce Samson, Dalila, the Queen of Sheba, Joseph, Moses, or other Biblical personages upon the stage, it is surely worse to sanction the performance of operas or dramas in which scenes are introduced representing the interior of churches, or religious ceremonies of any description! Worse than all is the performance of pieces calculated to throw ridicule upon ministers of religion. To see respectable audiences sitting complacently gazing at a popular actor personifying a clergyman dancing in a _pas de quatre_ with his chapel in the background, and to think that some of these very individuals may possibly be numbered amongst those who object to Sunday concerts, is indeed more than strange. In the meanwhile as this state of things exists, and the musical public is debarred from hearing a work like "Samson et Dalila" on the stage, it may be wondered that no one seems to have been struck with the idea of producing it in oratorio form in the concert-room. It is not creditable that England should remain the only nation where "Samson et Dalila" has not been given.[24] The prejudice existing against the employment of Biblical subjects for operatic purposes is unfortunate, as the fund of material is apparently exhaustless. The story of Samson and Dalila has furnished Saint-Saëns with a plot such as he has since sought for in vain in the pages of English and French history. The less complicated the story, the better it is fitted for operatic treatment. Wagner has exposed his reasons at length concerning the superiority of a legendary over a historical subject. Saint-Saëns is unfortunately not of this way of thinking. Of later years the bias of his mind has been rather tending towards historical subjects. "Samson et Dalila" may be considered not only as one of the master's best operas, perhaps even as the very best, but as one of the finest dramatic works produced by any French composer during the last five-and-twenty or thirty years.