rings down the curtain on his marriage bells. Men who would turn such a man out of a club bring their wives and daughters to look at him with admiration upon the stage, so demoralizing is a drama that has no intellectual tradition behind it. I could not endure it, and went out into the street and waited there until the end of the play, when I came in again to find the friends I had brought to hear it, but had I been accustomed to the commercial theatre I would not even have known that anything strange had happened upon the stage. If a man of intellect had written of such an incident he would have made his audience feel for the mistress that sympathy one feels for all that have suffered insult, and for that young man an ironical emotion that might have marred the marriage bells, and who knows what the curate and the journalist would have said of him? Even Ireland would have cried out: Catholic Ireland that should remember the gracious tolerance of the Church when all nations were its children, and how Wolfram of Eisenbach sang from castle to castle of the courtesy of Parzival, the good husband, and of Gawain, the light lover, in that very Thuringia where a generation later the lap of St. Elizabeth was full with roses. A Connaught Bishop told his people a while since that they ‘should never read stories about the degrading passion of love,’ and one can only suppose that being ignorant of a chief glory of his Church, he has never understood that this new puritanism is but an English cuckoo. AN IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE. [The performance of Mr. Synge’s _Shadow of the Glen_ started a quarrel with the extreme national party, and the following paragraphs are from letters written in the play’s defence. The organ of the party was at the time _The United Irishman_ (now _Sinn Fein_), but the first severe attack began in _The Independent_. _The United Irishman_, however, took up the quarrel, and from that on has attacked almost every play produced at our theatre, and the suspicion it managed to arouse among the political clubs against Mr. Synge especially led a few years later to the organised attempt to drive _The Playboy of the Western World_ from the stage.]