We have taken to criticizing the Creator Himself of late. The world is wrong, we are wrong. If only He had taken our advice, during those first six days! Why do I seem to have been scooped out and filled up with lead? Why do I hate the smell of bacon, and feel that nobody cares for me? It is because champagne and lobsters have been made wrong. Why do Edwin and Angelina quarrel? It is because Edwin has been given a fine, high-spirited nature that will not brook contradiction; while Angelina, poor girl, has been cursed with contradictory instincts. Why is excellent Mr. Jones brought down next door to beggary? Mr. Jones had an income of a thousand a year, secured by the Funds. But there came along a wicked Company promoter (why are wicked Company promoters permitted?) with a prospectus, telling good Mr. Jones how to obtain a hundred per cent. for his money by investing it in some scheme for the swindling of Mr. Jones’s fellow-citizens. The scheme does not succeed; the people swindled turn out, contrary to the promise of the prospectus, to be Mr. Jones and his fellow-investors. Why does Heaven allow these wrongs? Why does Mrs. Brown leave her husband and children, to run off with the New Doctor? It is because an ill-advised Creator has given Mrs. Brown and the New Doctor unduly strong emotions. Neither Mrs. Brown nor the New Doctor are to be blamed. If any human being be answerable it is, probably, Mrs. Brown’s grandfather, or some early ancestor of the New Doctor’s. We shall criticize Heaven when we get there. I doubt if any of us will be pleased with the arrangements; we have grown so exceedingly critical. It was once said of a very superior young man that he seemed to be under the impression that God Almighty had made the universe chiefly to hear what he would say about it. Consciously or unconsciously, most of us are of this way of thinking. It is an age of mutual improvement societies—a delightful idea, everybody’s business being to improve everybody else; of amateur parliaments, of literary councils, of playgoers’ clubs. First Night criticism seems to have died out of late, the Student of the Drama having come to the conclusion, possibly, that plays are not worth criticizing. But in my young days we were very earnest at this work. We went to the play, less with the selfish desire of enjoying our evening, than with the noble aim of elevating the Stage. Maybe we did good, maybe we were needed—let us think so. Certain it is, many of the old absurdities have disappeared from the Theatre, and our rough-and-ready criticism may have helped the happy dispatch. A folly is often served by an unwise remedy.