Though the Gallery, on the night when I attended, received it with rapt interest rather than delirious enthusiasm, _The Darling of the Gods_ promises once more to justify its title. The play has undergone very little modification since it was produced a decade ago. It remains pure melodrama incidentally set in a Japanese dress, and sprinkled with a few Japanese words. Here and there it may reproduce the Japanese attitude of mind, as distinct from details of custom, but the general spirit of it follows the traditional Anglo-Saxon lines. Anybody who knows no more of Japan than may be gathered from the pages of LAFCADIO HEARN will at least have learned that her youth is taught to regard the love-interest of an ordinary English novel as an indecency; and so will recognise the improbability of the romantic element in the play. Still, all that is of little consequence, for there must have been very few who went to His Majesty's to improve their acquaintance with comparative ethnology. The play has pleasant things for the eye; and one of the best of them was the face of Mr. GEORGE RELPH as _Kara_, leader of the Samurai. But there were horrors, too; notably the senile amorousness of _Zakkuri_ and the offensive little figure of _It_, his shadow--an interpolation in the bill of fare. A properly qualified dwarf I might have welcomed; but this precocious babe with the false moustache and the sham bald crown and the cynical giggle, who ought to have been in the nursery instead of serving his master with liquid stimulants and assisting in all sorts of wickedness, was a peculiarly nauseating object, and got on my nerves far more than the terrors of the torture-chamber. This painful business was done off, and indeed most of the bloody work was carried on out of sight--a curious economy in a play where there was so much talk of lethal tools. It is true that an arrow once flopped on to the stage, but it only brought a note from a friend's hand. Swords, too, were now and then raised to strike, but were always arrested in mid-air. Even in the last stand of the Samurai, where one might reasonably have hoped for some hand-to-hand play, nothing happened except one fatal shot from an unseen musket, and even then the stricken body fell into the wings. If it hadn't been for the throttling of a spy and a touch or two of hara-kiri in the dark of the Bamboo Forest we should have had practically no corpses at all.