As Belasco ceased speaking the orchestra began to play the air of “Maryland, My Maryland,” passing [Illustration: BELASCO, ABOUT 1902 Photograph by the Misses Selby. Belasco’s collection. ] from that into other melodies associated with his successful plays and closing with a plaintive tune written specially for use in “Du Barry.” On the “Du Barry” loving-cup there are three inscriptions. The first is Washington, D. C. December 12, 1901 Mrs Leslie Carter in David Belasco’s Play “Du Barry” The second is Presented to Mr. David Belasco by the Members of His Company New Year’s, 1902 The third is a line from the play of “Du Barry”: “Remember that we loved you; we loved you through it all” THE THEATRIC _RICHMOND_ “LOOKS PROUDLY O’ER THE CROWN.” The upward progress which Belasco made in the Theatre within a period of six years is amazing. When the curtain was raised for the first performance of his “The Heart of Maryland,” at the Herald Square, in October, 1895, he possessed almost nothing except his reputation as one of the most skilful of stage managers and a copious crop of debts. When the curtain fell on the last performance in 1901 of “Du Barry,” at the Criterion, he was, as dramatist, director, and theatrical manager, known, esteemed, and recognized throughout the English-speaking world: his debts were all discharged: he possessed a competent fortune, hosts of admirers, troops of friends: within less than three years he had made three memorably successful presentments in the British capital (where American ventures are supposed always to fail!): three of the most accomplished and popular actors of the American Stage, Mrs. Carter, Blanche Bates, and David Warfield, were under his direction and closely bound to him. The whirligig of Time had indeed brought striking changes. Lester Wallack, Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough--they were but names in theatrical management. Augustin Daly, the great representative manager of the Theatre in America, was dead. Albert M. Palmer, once Daly’s rival, was obscurely employed as a “business agent” for Richard Mansfield, while Mansfield’s own ambitious but ill-fated essay in theatre management (at the Garrick, New York, in 1895) was completely forgotten; Mansfield was definitely committed to the policy of a “travelling star,” and the Theatre in New York was Charles Frohman’s much vaunted Department Store. Mr. and Mrs. Harrison Grey Fiske, at the Manhattan, were indeed maintaining an admirable dramatic company and making an earnest endeavor in authentic theatrical management. But, in general, the mean spirit of the petty huckster and the sordid, selfish policy of trade monopoly dominated the American Stage; the chair of artistic managerial sovereignty was empty, “the sword unswayed, the empire unpossessed,” and Belasco, ambitiously emulative of great exemplars in his vocation, like a theatric _Richmond_, looked “proudly o’er the crown.” He was, unquestionably, the