"UNCLE NED." As the final curtain fell on the Fourth Act there was talk of celebrating the conversion of the villain in a bottle of the best (1906). But this did not mean that the good wine of the play had been kept to the end. Indeed it had been practically exhausted about the middle of the Third Act, and the rest was barley-water, sweet but relatively insipid. So long as Mr. HENRY AINLEY was just allowed to sparkle, with beaded bubbles winking all round the brim of him, everything went well and more than well; the trouble began when the author, Mr. DOUGLAS MURRAY, remembered that no British audience would be contented with mere irresponsible badinage, however fresh and delicate; that somehow he must provide an ending where virtue prevailed and sentiment was satisfied. So, when _Uncle Ned's_ humour had failed to move the brutal egoism of his brother, beating upon it like the lightest of sea-foam on a rock of basalt, he was made to fall back upon the alternative of heavy denunciation. And it was significant that this commonplace tirade drew more applause than all the pretty wit that had gone before it. Seldom have I been so profoundly impressed with the difficulties of an art which depends for its success (financial, that is to say) on the satisfaction of tastes that have nothing in common beyond the crudest elements of human nature. Mr. AINLEY had things all his own way. Between him, the romancer of the light heart and the free fancy, and his brother, the millionaire tradesman of the tough hide, there was the clash of temperaments but never the clash of intellects. ("Nobody with a sense of humour," says _Uncle Ned_, "ever made a million pounds.") That the man with the iron will should be beaten at the last with his own weapons, and brought to see the lifelong error of his ways by a violent philippic that must have surprised the speaker hardly less than his audience, was the most incredible thing in the play. Indeed the author was reduced to showing us the results of the bad man's change of heart and leaving us to imagine the processes, these being worked out in the interval between two Acts by means of a fortnight's physical collapse, from which he emerges unrecognisably reformed. I cannot praise too warmly the delightfully fantastic and inconsequent humour of the first half of the play. Often it was the things that Mr. AINLEY was given to say; but even more often, I think, it was the incomparable way he said them, with those astonishingly swift and unforeseen turns of gesture and glance and movement which are his peculiar gift. Now and then, to remind us of his versatility, he may turn to sentiment or even tragedy, but light comedy remains his natural _metier_.