They are modern enough for anyone, these wandering players. The gymnasts are at home on motor cycles, the clowns sport with burlesque aeroplanes. Yet they are wholesomely reactionary in other respects than those of having chariot races and such unaging feats of skill and strength as may have cheered the hearts of Caesar's legionaries. They are reactionary in that they turn man's newest triumphs into toys. The motor cycle loses its dignity and is no longer an imposing proof of the truth of materialistic philosophy when a girl, built, it seems, of Dresden china, rides it on one wheel over hurdles and through a hoop of flame. And see! Yorick himself, with his old painted grin and suit of motley, makes a Bleriot the butt of infinite jest. The circus is vulgar. Its enemies say so; its friends, with grateful hearts assent. It is _vulgar_, of the crowd. To no play upon the stage can this lofty praise be given. For the circus as it is to-day would thrill and amuse and delight not only the crowd that to-day see it, but the crowd that might come from the days before the Flood, or from the days of our great-grandchildren's children. When Adam watched with pleased astonishment an agile monkey leap among the branches of an Eden tree, and laughed at the foolish face of a giraffe, he saw a circus. Delightedly now would he sit upon a rickety chair beneath a canvas roof, smell the romantic aroma of elephant and trampled grass, and look at wonders. So it is that the vulgarity of the appeal of the circus--its democracy, if you prefer--has no temporal or geographic limits. And the performers themselves are a democracy--the acrobat who somersaults before death's eyes, the accomplished horseman, the amazing contortionist, the graceful juggler--all these are made equal by the ring, and, furthermore, they must compete for the applause of the throng with roller-skating bears, trained seals, and chalk-faced clowns. Yet there is aristocracy of the ring, and the subordination that Dr. Johnson praised. For here struts the ringmaster, with cracking whip, imperious voice, and marvelous evening clothes; the pageant with which the great show opened had its crowned queen; and even every troop of performing beasts has its four-footed leader. The stage's glories have been sung by many a poet. But the circus has had no laureate; it has had to content itself with the passionate prose of its press agent. The loss is poetry's, not the circus's. For the circus is itself a poem and a poet--a poem in that it is a lovely and enduring expression of the soul of man, his mirth, and his romance, and a poet in that it is a maker, a creator of splendid fancies in the minds of those who see it.