"Oh! you theatre-writers," cried out Vincent, "you are the most conceited of all. The applause of the multitude is, to you, the very honey of Hybla, and you sip and swallow it with the daintiest of faces and the sweetest of smiles. But I am going to take up the role of devil's advocate, and add that you are as little to be found fault with, for your anxiousness and eagerness (which many folks think are nothing but the pangs of your vanity), as anybody else who is playing a great and risky game. You are staking yourselves; winning means applause, but losing means not only deserved blame, but (if this amounts to a distinct public expression of it) that besmirching of the ludicrous which is the bitterest and (as the French think) the most fearful and damnable condemnation which a man can' experience here below. A virtuous Frenchman would, therefore, much rather be considered a vile reprobate than be laughed at, and it is quite certain that a ban of being ludicrous always falls on any playwright who has been (theatrically speaking) 'damned'; and he never shakes it off in all his lifetime. Even future success is a most questionable affair, and many a man who has had this misfortune happen to him, has fled in his despair to the doleful wilderness of those productions which possess the outward appearance of theatrical pieces, but, as their authors solemnly assure us, are not meant for representation." "I," said Theodore, "can corroborate you both most thoroughly from my own experience, that it is a most hazardous matter to put a work on to the stage. What it really amounts to is, that you are committing a property of yours to the mercy of the winds and the waves. When one remembers how many thousand accidental contingencies the effect of a work depends upon, how very often the deeply considered and carefully contrived effect of some passage is shipwrecked by the blunder, the unskilfulness, or the mistake of a singer or instrumentalist; how often--" Vincent here interrupted with a vigourous cry of "hear! hear!"