nightly out of the brilliant Boulevards into those temples of the drama in which MM. Dumas, _fils_, and Sardou are the high priests. But you might spend your evening with them better almost anywhere than at the theatre. As I said just now, they are much more _naïf_ than Parisian spectators--at least as regards being amused. They cry with much less facility, but they laugh more freely and heartily. I remember nothing in Paris that corresponds with the laugh of the English gallery and pit--with its continuity and simplicity, its deep-lunged jollity and its individual guffaws. But you feel that an English audience is intellectually much less appreciative. A Paris audience, as regards many of its factors, is cynical, skeptical, indifferent; it is so intimately used to the theatre that it doesn't stand on ceremony; it yawns, and looks away and turns its back; it has seen too much, and it knows too much. But it has the critical and the artistic sense, when the occasion appeals to them; it can judge and discriminate. It has the sense of form and of manner; it heeds and cares how things are done, even when it cares little for the things themselves. Bohemians, artists, critics, connoisseurs--all Frenchmen come more or less under these heads, which give the tone to a body of Parisian spectators. These do not strike one as "nice people" in the same degree as a collection of English patrons of the drama--though doubtless they have their own virtues and attractions; but they form a natural, sympathetic public, while the English audience forms only a conventional, accidental one. It may be that the drama and other works of art are best appreciated by people who are not "nice"; it may be that a lively interest in such matters tends to undermine niceness; it may be that, as the world grows nicer, various forms of art will grow feebler. All this _may_ be; I don't pretend to say it is; the idea strikes me _en passant_.