upon,” We have no “great” Shakespearean actors now, but even if we had, should we care to devote to them the minute, elaborate attention paid by Hazlitt? One thinks of that time, a hundred years ago, of the great tragedy kings and queens as rather a stuffy world. Playgoing must have been a formidable enterprise ... but yet, you never can tell. There were frolicsome compensations. You might come back from the play to the office to learn your editor had been dining with a duke. And with luck next morning you might find a pretty actress at his door. TALK AT THE MARTELLO TOWER Our boatman with blue eyes and red cheeks is not more skilful with the oar than any of his fellows or more ready to give you change out of a shilling when he has rowed you across the harbour, though the notice board says the fare is twopence. But the ladies love primary colours, and we had to have him. We all three had our novels, and the blue eyes glanced at them, especially the yellow-back, with disfavour. He is a Swedenborgian—our little port, like most, is rich in out-of-the-way religions—and presumably regards all modern literature as on the wrong tack. It was not until we had parted with him at the Martello tower that we dared open our books. Selina had grabbed Patty’s, the yellow-back, but she soon laid it down, and made a face. “My dear Patty,” she said wearily, “how _can_ you go on reading Gyp? Don’t you see that the silly woman doesn’t even know how to tell her own silly stories?” Patty slightly flushed. She knew Gyp was a countess and great-granddaughter of Mirabeau-Tonneau, and felt it was almost Bolshevist manners to call so well-born a woman silly. Nothing could have been more frigid than her “What on earth do you mean, Selina?” “I mean,” said Selina, “that the poor woman is dreadfully _vieux jeu_. I’m not thinking of her social puppets, her vicious clubmen, her languid swells, her anti-Semite Hebrews, her fashionable ladies who are no better than they should be though, goodness knows, these are old-fashioned enough. She began making them before I was born.” (Selina is no chicken, but it was horrid of Patty to raise her eyebrows.) “What I mean is, that she is at the old worn-out game of playing the omniscient author. Here she is telling you not only what Josette said and did when La Réole attacked her, but what La Réole said and did when Josette had left him, and so on. She ‘goes behind’ everybody, tells you what is inside everybody’s head. Why can’t she take her point of view, and stick to it? Wasn’t her obvious point of view Josette’s? Then she should have told us nothing about the other people but what Josette could know or divine about them.” “Ah, Selina,” I interrupted, “your ‘goes behind’ gives you away. You’ve been reading Henry James’s letters.” “Like everybody else,” she snapped.