National response to recruitment of first batch most gratifying. Save 60,000 men the half-million already enrolled. At present rate of progress another couple of days or so will see number completed. Meanwhile PREMIER asks for another half-million. These forthcoming, and in present mood of nation there is no doubt on subject, "We shall be in a position," he added, "to put something like 1,200,000 men in the field," a sight that would make WELLINGTON, not to mention MARLBOROUGH, stare. With that patriotic zeal that has marked attitude of Opposition since war began BONAR LAW warmly supported proposal. Vote agreed to without debate or division. _Business done._--Having voted additional half-million men for Army, House adjourned till Monday. * * * * * AT THE PLAY. "BLUFF KING HAL." The arrangements for the production of Mr. LOUIS PARKER'S pageant-comedy had of course been made long before war was contemplated. The completion of Mr. BOURCHIER'S beard in itself points to a comparatively remote date for the play's inception. Certainly there is nothing very apposite in its theme at the present juncture; for HARRY OF ENGLAND, suffering from the gout, blustering into a sixth marriage, and haunted by the ghosts of four dead wives and the wraith of the sole survivor, is not a figure precisely calculated to inspire patriotic fervour. Still, the circumstances of the play are sufficiently national, and it should serve well enough as a permissible distraction for non-combatants. You need not be terrified by the complexity of the cast, which consists of twenty prominent characters, twenty-four in smaller type, four ghosts and a wraith, and a sprinkling of nameless "halberdiers, huntsmen, minstrels, servitors, etc." (The soldier-supers--a type not to be confused with the super-soldier--were a very scratch lot; and I must hope that this defect was due to the enlistment of the more martial spirits in the profession.) The history of the period is made easy for all intelligences, and the relations of _Katharine Parr_ with her lover, _Sir Thomas Seymour_, furnish a clear thread of human interest.