The admirable "Q" has shot his arrow into the gold so often and carried off so mountainous a load of trophies that he can see with equanimity his last shot signalled an outer--even a miss. The signaller must needs be more dismayed than he. "Q" is also too honest and perceptive a critic not to see the weak points of _The Mayor of Troy_ as a stage play, though he may fairly plume himself on the pleasant (and unpleasant) folk of his creation who partly came to life on the opening night at the Haymarket. He will have found out and noted for an appendix to those lively and instructive discourses of his _On the Art of Writing_ that it is a jolly difficult thing to write a play; that an act is not a chapter of a novel, still less a _compote_ of bits of many chapters; that, while to be charmingly discursive is a paramount quality of the higher type of novelist, the same attribute in a play, whose very breath of life is essential brevity, makes it appear to go on crutches, like his own discomfited hero. It bemuses an audience and gravels the players--as the queer uncertainty of touch of so skilful, so conscientious an actor as Mr. AINLEY sufficiently betrayed. But to the story. [Illustration: CURED OF OBESITY IN TEN YEARS. _The Mayor of Troy (Mr. Henry Ainley) before and after prison diet._] Portly and pompous _Major Solomon Hymen Toogood_ (Mr. AINLEY), wealthy citizen of Troy Town, and, in the perilous year of grace 1804, for the seventh time its Mayor; Justice of the Peace, in command of the battery of _Diehards_ which himself had raised, spoilt by the worship of the women and the tractability (with reservations) of the men, has reason to be mightily pleased with himself; and very distinctly is. On this pleasant day on which the play opens he has written a proposal of marriage to a lady whose heart, unhappily, is already given to his Deputy in civic office and Second in Command of the battery, Dr. _Dillworthy_ (Mr. LEON QUARTERMAINE). Meanwhile a little smuggling expedition, which he had planned under cover of his military authority (Sir ARTHUR does not quite put it like that), turns into a genuine fight, and our Mayor is carried off prisoner to France.