Whether the large sums of money expended produce an effect agreeable to the trained eye is a little outside the topic. Yet it must be suggested that such beauty as the costly stage pictures present generally belongs to the category of the very obvious. This is not surprising; if a great deal of money is spent in order to produce a gorgeous spectacle, common-sense demands that the result should be to the taste of a vast number of people, otherwise the management must lose money. It would be idle to pretend that there are very many playgoers who possess fine taste, consequently the money must be lavished in order to delight people with a more or less uncultivated taste. No doubt a great deal of money may be spent on quiet details, and sometimes is, without the attention of the ordinary playgoer being drawn to the expenditure, but the case is exceptional. In plain English, it very rarely happens that the extravagant sums employed in mounting plays produce a beauty that appeals successfully to any people save those whose ideas of the pictorial art are bounded by the exhibitions of the Royal Academy. Moreover, consideration is paid to the fact that there are Philistines who will admire a thing merely because they believe it to be costly. Certainly there is much to be said on the other side, or at least a great deal is urged by people who believe what they say. It has been pretended that Shakespeare would have been delighted by such productions of his works as we have seen in modern times, and have rejoiced in the pictures contrived by the scene-painter, costumier and others working under the direction of the producer. To this it has been objected that, though the pictures might have pleased him, he would have been disgusted by the fact that a good many of his beautiful lines have to be cut because of the length of _entr'actes_ and occasional pieces of stage business designed in order to draw the attention of the audience to the beauty of the scenery. The reply is made that a large quantity of the most famous passages in Shakespeare are descriptive of scenery, and would not have been written but for the fact that he had no other means of conveying his ideas to the audience. If there be any truth in this, one may be very thankful for the fact which coerced him into his word-painting. Certainly the world has profited by this compulsion, for millions who have never and will never see the theatre's efforts to represent Shakespeare's pictures have had infinite pleasure from the author's successful endeavours to realize his ideas by the force of words.