hand, the performers are chiefly women. These are the temples of the leg drama. "_Pièce aux jambes? Pièce aux cuisses!_" indignantly exclaims Eugene Pelletan, denouncing such performances in his "Nouvelle Babylone"; and he goes on to add some cumulative illustrations which I omit. Well, the Prince of Wales loves the _pièce aux jambes_, and the theatres where it flourishes. He constantly visits theatres at which his wife and sisters are never seen, and in which it would be idle to deny that there are actresses who have made themselves conspicuous objects of popular scandal. Now, I am far from saying that this necessarily implies anything worse than a low taste on the part of the Prince of Wales. But there are stations in life which render private bad taste a public sin. In London, of late, there has been a just outcry against a certain kind of theatrical performance. It is held to be demoralizing and degrading that the stage should be made simply a show-place for the exhibition of half-naked women, for the audacious display of legs and bosoms. Now, I beg to say for myself that I have entire faith in the dramatic as in every other art; that I believe it always when truthfully pursued vindicates itself, and that I think any costume which the true and legitimate needs of the drama require is fitting, proper, and modest. I regard the ballet, in its place, as a graceful and delightful entertainment; and I do not believe that any healthy and pure mind ought to be offended by the kind of costume which the dance requires. But artists and moralists in London alike objected, and justly objected, to performances the whole purpose, and business, and attraction of which was the exhibition of a crowd of girls as nearly naked as they could venture to show themselves in public. Now this was undoubtedly the kind of exhibition which the Prince of Wales especially favored and patronized. Night after night, even during the long and lamentable illness of his young wife, he visited such theatres, and gazed upon "those prodigies of myriad nakednesses." Likewise did he much delight in the performances of Schneider--that high priestess of the obscene, rich with the spoils of princes. I say emphatically that there were actions, gestures, _bouffonneries_ performed amid peals of laughter and thunders of applause by this fat Faustina in the St. James's Theatre, London, which were only fit to have gladdened the revels of Sodom and Gomorrah. And this woman was, artistically at least, the prime favorite of the Prince of Wales; and when his brother, the Duke of Edinburgh, reached England for the first time after his escape from the Fenian bullet in Sydney, the _par nobile fratrum_ celebrated the auspicious event by hastening to the theatre where Schneider kicked and wriggled and helped out the point of lascivious songs by a running accompaniment of obscene gestures.