In the "Tales out of School," published after H. J. Beenham's death by one of the many pupils who became grateful on his achieving celebrity, there is an admirable account of his first impression of the theater which can only refer to the performance of Mr. Copas in the Flat Iron Market. Till then he says he had always regarded the theater as one of those pleasures without which life would be more tolerable, one of those pleasures to face which it is necessary to eat and drink too much. The two respectable theaters in Thrigsby were maintained by annual pantomimes and kept open from week to week by the visits of companies presenting replicas of alleged successful London plays. He had never attended either theater unless some one else paid. . . . Here now in this ramshackle Theater Royal, half tent, half booth, his sensations were very mixed. At first the shabby scenery, the poverty of the stage furniture, the tawdriness of the costumes of the players, filled him with a pitying sense of the ludicrous. The program was generous, opening with "Robert Macaire," passing on to "Mary Queen of Scots," and ending with a farce called "Trouble in the Home," while between the pieces there would be song and dance by Mr. Fitter, the celebrated comedian. All this was announced on a placard hanging from the proscenium. . . . Mary Queen of Scots was sitting, crowned, on a Windsor chair at the back of the stage, surrounded with three courtiers. As Darnley (or it might be Bothwell), Mr. Copas was delivering himself of an impassioned if halting narration, addressed to the hapless Queen through the audience. He was certainly a very bad actor, so Beenham thought until he had listened to him for nearly five minutes, at the end of which a change took place in his mind and he found himself forced to accept Mr. Copas's own view of the traffic of the stage. It was impossible to make rhyme or reason of the play, which showed the most superb disregard for history and sense. Apart from Mr. Copas it did not exist. He was its center and its circumference. It began and ended in him, moved through him from its beginning to its end. The rest of the characters were his puppets. When he came to an end of a period Mary Queen of Scots would turn on one of three moods--the tearful, the regal, the noisily defiant; or a page would say, "Me Lord! Me Lord!"; or the lugubrious young man, dressed in priestly black, would borrow from another play and in a sepulchral voice declaim, "Beware the Ides of March." The performance was an improvisation and in that art only Mr. Copas had any skill, unless he had deliberately so subdued the rest that he was left with his own passionate belief in himself and acting as acting to clothe the naked and deformed skeleton with flesh. Whatever the process of his mind he did succeed in hypnotizing himself and his audience, including Mr. Mole and Matilda, and worked up to a certain height and