Greek, had played Lady Macbeth, and, though not a Sappho, was a much better poetess than Ella Wheeler Wilcox. [Illustration: AT THE FRENCH PLAY Happy thought: Incognito secured--blushes concealed--and self-respect preserved (at least outwardly).] Another actress of the "hectic" type, about whom _Punch_ as an informal _censor morum_ was much exercised, was the famous Mlle. Schneider, who incarnated the _canaillerie_ of Offenbach, and was the idol of Paris in the years in which the Second Empire was dancing to its doom. She appeared in _La Grande Duchesse_ and _La Belle Hélène_ in London in the season of 1868, drew the town at the St. James's Theatre, but met with little encouragement from the Press. _Punch_ declares that Schneider was far more vulgar in London than in Paris, though on her native heath her performance was witnessed chiefly by ladies of the faster set; and draws the moral that they manage these things better in France. He found her "perhaps scarcely so extravagant in her vulgarity" in _La Belle Hélène_, but "there is all that excessive grimacing, continual adoption of the 'cad'-tone (which her admirers think so charmingly clever), that pointless introduction of rough horse-play, hitting and kicking, without which Schneider would not be Schneider." So _Punch_ notes, as a "natural consequence" of the indulgence allowed by the Lord Chamberlain to Schneider to "kick up behind and before," like "Ole Joe," on every occasion, the production of the notorious and (for the time) audacious play of _Formosa_ a year later. _Formosa_ was a play of fast life, with scenes at Cookham (hence the name); a strange amalgam of impropriety and sentimentality; and _Punch_ dealt faithfully with the ridiculous situation in which the heroine, discovered by her parents in the most compromising company, "makes a sudden and miraculous leap from the lowest vice to the height of most sublime virtue." [Sidenote: _Comedy and Satire_]