We have an extraordinary amount of eating nowadays upon the stage, managed very badly. In the old days, when people got through a banquet, consisting chiefly of a special brand of cardboard chicken, a real _dîner à la carte_ at the present time only used in pantomime, washed down by copious draughts of nothing from gilded _papier-maché_ goblets which refuse to make the chink of metal, and spent no more than five minutes over the whole affair, it was recognized that the banquet was a mere convention; nobody pretended to believe in any aspect of it, and therefore no one questioned its verisimilitude. In the twentieth century real food is consumed, the diet being chiefly vegetarian, and damp decoctions are drunk with gusto. Occasionally, it is said, Persian sherbet, or lemon kali, once joys of our youth, give a theatrical fizziness to toast and water in bottles with deceitful lordly labels. Unfortunately, except in _The Man from Blankley's_, these real things are consumed as fast as a midday meal at an American boarding-house, with the result that they are a mixture of realism and convention profoundly unconvincing. Art would be better served by the old-fashioned method, for the playgoer is more willing to concede a whole than a half "make-belief." One amusing result of the fact that we have so many adaptations from the French is that not only are the names abominably mispronounced--which can hardly be avoided--but that the efforts at representing the foreign feeding as a rule are all wrong. Simili-champagne is consumed where no Frenchman would dream of drinking "fizz," for across the Channel the detestable snobbishness of the English in relation to champagne is imitated chiefly by the modern plutocracy and by the prosperous members of what is alleged to be the most ancient, if hardly the most honourable, of professions. When we see a French company in a play, the leading lady solemnly wipes the inside of her glass with her napkin, occasionally goes a little further and breathes into it--breathes rather dampishly. In the subsequent English version the leading actress is far too much of a lady to do anything of the kind. The foreigners cut up everything on their plates, clean their knives upon the bread, sometimes before and sometimes afterwards scooping out the salt with them, and then lay them by for the next dish. Of course the English company is not guilty of such solecisms. The original troupe stuffs a napkin, half-way in size between a bath-towel and a tablecloth, inside its neck-band so as to protect its clothes against the little _taches_ concerning which, as a rule, it is more anxious in relation to its costume than its character--in the play; but our better-bred players ignore this, and merely spread their "serviettes" upon their unimperilled knees. Has anyone ever seen a British player, even when he called himself "Ongri" or "Gontrang," wipe his plate with a piece of bread and swallow the latter rapturously?