Not even the Irishman's passion for originality is strong enough to resist the common impulse of human nature to follow the course of the sun; he must migrate westward like the Saxon before him, and it is surely remarkable to find a theater holding out against a social tendency to which an Irishman succumbs. When a flood of new thoroughfares submerged old theatrical London in the last years of the nineteenth century and created a new theaterdom farther west; when the barbarous hoardings of the Strand Improvement obliterated so many resorts of leisure, and, like the people of Croton, the London County Council diverted a stream of traffic to flow where once was the Sybaris of Holywell Street and the Opéra Comique; when the Lyceum and the Adelphi changed the quality of their wares; when Terry's became a cinema palace and His Grace of Bedford sold Drury Lane overnight--the Vanity was almost the only theater that preserved its position and its character. The peak of Ararat was not more welcome to the water-weary eyes of Noah than to patrons of a theater as old-fashioned as the Ark was the sight of that little island upon which the Vanity maintained itself amid the wrecks and ruins of the engulfed Strand. Close by, as if to commemorate the friendly rivalry of Church and Stage, upon another island St. Clement Dane's cleft the traffic of Fleet Street long after Temple Bar had been swept away; and it was agreeably appropriate that the church where Doctor Johnson, our greatest conservative, was wont to bow his head before the slow grinding of God's mills should have for company in a visible protest against the illusion of progress that monument of English conservatism, the Vanity Theater. More secure upon its island in the Strand than the Eddystone Lighthouse upon its rock in the Channel, the illuminated portico of the Vanity blazed away as brightly as it ever did before the destruction of the mean streets that used to obscure its glory. Not far off, the Savoy Hotel served as prologue and epilogue to its entertainments; and no alliance between one of the new theaters in Piccadilly and the Ritz or Carlton could yet claim to have superseded that time-honored alliance between the Vanity and the Savoy.