Audiences may be divided into first-nighters, second-nighters, and general playgoers. All audiences are important, but first-nighters most of all. Without them the acted drama would not begin to exist. For obvious reasons, I have nothing but good to say of them. I wish to live at peace with my neighbours. And I do not believe the malicious story told about a manager, now dead, that he liked to fill the second row of his stalls on first-nights with his superannuated sweethearts. Nobody is fat or old in Ba-ath, and there are no superannuitants among first-nighters. I find, from Mr. Max Beerbohm’s entirely delightful book “Seven Men,” that it is possible to get tired of first-nighters. I should never have guessed it myself. But this is what he says:—“I was dramatic critic for the _Saturday Review_, and, weary of meeting the same lot of people over and over again at first nights, had recently sent a circular to the managers, asking that I might have seats for second nights instead.” But mark what follows:—“I found that there existed as distinct and invariable a lot of second-nighters as of first-nighters. The second-nighters were less ‘showy’; but then, they came more to see than to be seen, and there was an air that I liked of earnestness and hopefulness about them. I used to write a good deal about the future of the British drama, and they, for their part, used to think and talk a great deal about it. Though second-nighters do come to see, they remain rather to hope and pray.” Because I have quoted I must not be understood as accepting Mr. Beerbohm’s implied aspersion on first-nighters. It is all very well for him. He has retired (the more’s the pity) from dramatic criticism. But I take his account of second-nighters on trust, because the exigencies of a daily newspaper prevent me from observing them for myself. Evidently they, no more than first-nighters, are average playgoers. Not that I would disparage the general playgoer. Indeed, I am not sure that he is not, in another sense than Labiche’s, _le plus heureux des trois_. I can speak for myself. Mind, I am saying nothing against first-nighters. They are entirely admirable persons—I could never bring myself, like Mr. Beerbohm, to call them a lot. But oh! the joy of being, on holiday occasions, a general playgoer, of throwing one’s considering cap over the mills, of garnering no impressions for future “copy,” of blithely ignoring one’s better judgment, of going comfortably home from the play, like everybody else, instead of dashing madly into a taxi for the newspaper office! The play will be well on in its run, the comedian will have polished up his jokes, the superfluities will have been cut out, the programme girls will long since have given up leading the applause, you won’t know a soul, and you won’t even bother to look at the author’s name. You surrender your individuality and drift with the crowd, or, in more pretentious language, merge yourself in the collective consciousness.