Really the actresses of legitimate drama, whom one should call the _actresses_, have a grievance not merely in the fact that the peerage does not woo them (since in a good many instances the bride has paid dearly for her elevation), nor merely because women of the oldest profession open to the sex miscall themselves actresses when in trouble--the term actress being like the word "charity"--but because their title includes many persons of notoriety who, if forced to rely solely upon their talent, could hardly earn a pound a week in true drama. "True drama," for the common term "musico-dramatic" points to the fact that the fortunate nymphs belong to the lighter (and sometimes degraded) forms of musical work and not of the legitimate drama. Some wag, no doubt, has called their branch the _leg_-itimate drama. In the mid-Victorian days the advertisements of drama were trifling. Thirty years ago the photographs of Miss Maud Branscombe, a real beauty, but not an actress of great quality, created quite a stir, and made her name well known throughout the land; and the publication of them was, probably, the beginning of the present deluge. The two illustrated papers of importance published pictures only of actresses who by means of their talent had made a genuine sensation; and therefore but few were presented in the year. Nowadays there are from thirty to forty photographs a week in the illustrated papers of actresses--using the term in its widest sense. Many young ladies, who twenty years ago could not by any decent means have got their likenesses exhibited to the public except in shop-window photographs, now simper at us fifty-two times a year, or more, and are sometimes described as "the celebrated actress," though a few of them never get beyond the dignity of a single silly line in the book of a musical hodge-podge. Miss XXX smiles at us from her 40-h.p. "bloater car" which has cost a larger sum than eight years of her salary, and the simple-minded think she must be a great star to be able to afford such a luxury, not knowing that she herself is the luxury which someone else is unable to afford. The humble old devices are now stale tricks. The actress in search of notoriety does not lose her jewels: she brings an action which is reported at great length, and during it half-a-dozen members of the profession get a splendid chance of blowing their own trumpets. There was a cruel case a little while ago: one of these "damaged darlings" of the stage did lose her jewels--which had cost about as much as that admirable actress Amy Roselle earned in her honourable career with a tragic ending--but felt bound to keep silent about the loss, since to have mentioned it would have seemed like "out-of-date" advertising. "View jew," she called it.