As for the Pagello of the new play, the American dramatist has made him just a tame, hopelessly bewildered donkey. He is provided with a fierce Italian sweetheart, to bring him back safe, if scolded, from Paris to Italy. He lives freely on other people’s money, George’s—when it isn’t Alfred’s. After all, it doesn’t matter, for all the people of the play are mere travesties of the originals, turned (in the published book of the play, though not at the Duke of York’s) into modern American citizens. Buloz talks of “boosting” his subscriptions. Alfred says George is “like a noisy old clock that won’t stop ticking.” Oh dear! STENDHAL In reviewing the performance by the New Shakespeare Company of _King Henry V._ I was reminded by one of Henry’s lines at Agincourt, We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, to speak, it may have seemed a trifle incongruously, of Stendhal. But it was Stendhal who said, “je n’écris que pour les _happy few_.” No quotation could have been more appropriate. Stendhal’s readers have always been few, but they have been enthusiastic. In his lifetime he was hardly read at all, though Balzac gave him a magnificent “puff”—so magnificent that even Stendhal himself was taken aback by it and infused a little irony into his thanks. He supposed himself to be ahead of his time, and in 1840 said he would be understood somewhere about 1880. It was rather a good shot, for somewhere about that date there came into being the fierce tribe of Stendhalians, who founded the “Stendhal Club” and included in their number no less a man than M. Paul Bourget. But the vicissitudes of literary reputations are as uncertain as anything in this world, and M. Bourget wondered what would be thought of Stendhal in another forty years—namely, in 1920. Well, 1920 has arrived, as the years have the habit of doing with abominable rapidity, and any one who likes can seek for an answer to M. Bourget’s question. I will hazard a guess. I doubt if in the interval there has been very much change in Stendhal’s position. Now, as in 1880, Stendhal is read, and immoderately loved, by the “happy few,” and ignored or detested by the rest. But, in enjoying him, the happy few contrive to take him a little less seriously than did the Stendhal Club. That process goes on with even greater reputations. Croce, we are told, takes Dante more lightly than has been the habit of Italian critics in the last half-century. We English are gradually learning to discuss Shakespeare as a human being. And here, pat to the occasion, is a paper on Stendhal in the _Revue de Paris_ by M. Anatole France, which handles its subject with the easy Anatolian grace we all know and does, perhaps, at the same time indicate what the readers of 1920 think of Stendhal, though none of them would express their thought of him with the same charm.