I felt, to myself, during these days, in a small way, very much like a Francisque Sarcey; I don't mean as to the gloominess of my conclusions, but as to the diffusiveness of my method. A spectator with his senses attuned to all those easy Parisian harmonies feels himself, in London, to be in a place in which the drama cannot, in the nature of things, have a vigorous life. Before he has put his feet into a theatre he is willing to bet his little all that the stage will turn out to be weak. If he is challenged for the reasons of this precipitate skepticism, he will perhaps be at loss to give them; he will only say, "Oh, I don't know, _cela se seut_. Everything I see is a reason. I don't look out of the window, I don't ring the bell for some coals, I don't go into an eating-house to dine, without seeing a reason." And then he will begin to talk about the duskiness and oppressiveness of London; about the ugliness of everything that one sees; about beauty and grace being never attempted, or attempted here and there only to be wofully missed; about the visible, palpable Protestantism; about the want of expression in people's faces; about the plainness and dreariness of everything that is public and the inaccessibility of everything that is private; about the lower classes being too miserable to know the theatre, and the upper classes too "respectable" to understand it. And here, if the audacious person we are conceiving is very far gone, he will probably begin to talk about English "hypocrisy" and prudery, and to say that these are the great reason of the feebleness of the stage. When he approaches the question of English "hypocrisy" you may know that he is hopelessly Gallicized, or Romanized, or Germanized, or something of that sort; and indeed his state of mind at this point strikes me myself with a certain awe. I don't venture to follow him, and I discreetly give up the attempt. But up to this point I can see what he may have meant, in the midst of his flippancy, and I remember how to my own imagination at first everything seemed to hang together, and theatres to be what they were because somehow the streets, and shops, and hotels, and eating-houses were what they were. I remember something I said to myself after once witnessing a little drama of real life at a restaurant. The restaurant in question is in Piccadilly, and I am trying to think under which of the categories of our Gallicized observer it would come. The remarkable façade, covered with gilded mosaics and lamps, is certainly a concession to the idea of beauty; though whether it is a successful one is another question. Within it has, besides various other resources, one of those peculiar refectories which are known in England as grill-rooms, and which possess the picturesque feature of a colossal gridiron, astride of a corresponding fire, on which your chops and steaks are toasted before your eyes. A grill-room is a bad place to dine, but it is a convenient place to lunch.