MR. PINERO'S new play at the Garrick Theatre is a series of scenes in dialogue with only one "situation," which comes at the end of the third act, and was evidently intended to be utterly unconventional, dreadfully daring, and thrillingly effective. "Unconventional?" Yes. "Daring?" Certainly; for to burn a bible might have raised a storm of sibilation. But why dare so much to effect so little? For at the reading, or during rehearsal, there must have been very considerable hesitation felt by everybody, author included, as to the fate of this risky situation--this "_momentum unde pendet_"--and for which nothing, either in the character or in the previous history of the heroine, has prepared us. Her earliest years have been passed in squalor; she has made a miserable marriage; then she has become a Socialist ranter, and hopes to achieve a triumph as a Socialist demagogue. Like Maypole Hugh in _Barnaby Rudge_ she would go about the world shrieking "No property! No property!" and when, in a weak moment, she consents to temporarily drop her "mission," she goes to another extreme and comes out in an evening dress--I might say almost comes out _of_ an evening dress, so egregiously _décolleté_ is it--to please the peculiar and, apparently, low taste of her lover, who is a married man,--"which well she knows it," as Mrs. GAMP observes,--but with whom she is living, and with whom, like GRANT ALLEN'S _The Woman who did_ (a lady whom in many respects Mr. PINERO'S heroine closely resembles), and who came to grief in doing it, she intends to continue living. This man, her paramour, she trusts will be her partner in the socialistic regeneration of the human race. At the close of the third act _Mrs. Ebbsmith_, being such as the author of her being has made her, is presented with a bible, and, in a fit of ungovernable fury, she pitches it into the stove "with all her might and main"; and then it suddenly occurs to her that she has committed some terrible crime (more probably it occurred to the author that _he_ had committed the unpardonable sin of offending his audience)--and so she shoots out her arm into a nice, cool-looking stove (suggestive of no sort of danger to her or the book), and drags out the pocket volume apparently quite as uninjured as is her own hand at the moment, though this is subsequently carefully bound up with a white handkerchief in the last act. Well--that's all. There is _the_ situation. The Key-note-orious _Mrs. Ebbsmith_ is supposed to repent of her sins against society; and off she goes to become the companion of the unmarried parson and of the lively widow his sister. What the result of this arrangement will be is pretty clear. The Key-note-orious One will soon be the parson's bride; but "that is another story."