I imagine that the authors who founded this play on a Hungarian original regarded it as an ambitious piece of work. If so, they were right in the sense that they have attempted something very much beyond their powers. In the view of the gentleman who addressed us at the fall of the curtain (I understand that he was one of the authors) it offered magnificent opportunities (I think "magnificent" was the word) for the brilliant gifts of two of the actors. Certainly it covered a good bit of ground, what with this world and the next; for it started with roundabouts on the Heath, and got as far away as the Judgment Day (Hungarian style?)--and fourteen years after. I may have a contemptibly weak stomach for this kind of thing, but I confess that I don't care much for a representation of the Judgment Day in a melodrama of low life. Of course low life has just as much right as any other sort of life to be represented in a Judgment Day scene; but it ought to behave itself there and not introduce back-chat. I should explain that it was a special Suicide Court, and that the object of _The Magister_, as the Presiding Judge was named in the programme, was to inquire into the record of the delinquent and, if his answers were satisfactory, to allow him to revisit the scenes of his earthly life in order to repair any little omissions that he might have made in the hurry of departure. Unfortunately the leading case was a bad example of suicide. It had not been deliberate; he had simply killed himself impromptu in a tight corner to avoid arrest for intended murder. Worse still, when he returned to earth after a lapse of fourteen years' purgatory (between the sixth and seventh scenes), for his record was a rotten one and he had shown no signs of penitence, the _revenant_ made very poor use of his hour. Returning to his wife whom he had brutalised, he found that she had taught their girl-child to regard him as a paragon of virtue, and most of his limited time was spent in correcting this beautiful legend. You see, at the time of his death he had had no chance of making the child realise how bad he was, for the excellent reason that she had not yet been born, so he seized this opportunity of making good that omission. As a practical illustration of the kind of man he really had been, he struck the child violently on the arm. We all saw him do it and we all heard the smack, but the child assured us that she had not felt anything. This I suppose was the author's way, ingenuous enough, of reminding us that it was a case of spirit and not of flesh, whatever our eyes and ears might persuade us to think of it.