A veteran who has been regaling the readers of _The Times_ with his recollections of the London stage has dropped by the way a remark on modern theatrical criticism. For it, he says, “the play is everything, and the leading actor or actress has often to be content with a few lines.” Dean Gaisford began a sermon, “Saint Paul says, and I partly agree with him.” I partly agree with the veteran. Criticism has occasionally to deal with plays that cannot be “everything” for it. There are new plays that are merely a vehicle for the art of the actor, who must then get more than a few lines. There are old plays revived to show a new actor in a classic part, and the part is then greater than the whole. This, I think, accounts for “the space devoted to the acting in London criticisms at the time Henry Irving rose to fame.” Either he appeared in new plays of little intrinsic merit, like _The Bells_, or else in classic parts of melodrama (made classic by Frédéric Lemaître) or of Shakespeare. In these conditions criticism must always gravitate towards the acting. It did so, long before Irving’s time, with Hazlitt over Edmund Kean. It has done so, since Irving’s time, over Sarah and Duse, and must do so again over every new Shylock or Millamant or Sir Peter. But these conditions are exceptional, and it is well for the drama that they are. For the vitality of the drama primarily depends not upon the talent of its interpreters but on that of its creators, and a new image or new transposition of life in a form appropriate to the theatre is more important than the perfection of the human instrument by which it is “made flesh.” If criticism, then, has of late years and on the whole been able to devote more attention to the play than to the playing, I suggest to our veteran that the fact is a healthy sign for our drama. It shows that there have been plays to criticise and that criticism has done its duty.