In the early 'seventies the sacred lamp of burlesque, as journalists moved to poesy by their theme have it, was lighted at the Vanity, and in the waning 'eighties the gas-lamp of burlesque, with nothing but an added brightness to mark the change, became the electric bulb of musical comedy. Time moved slowly at the Vanity; tenors grew hoarse and comedians grew stiff, but they were not easily superseded; many ladies grew stout, but the boards of the Vanity were strong, and even the places of those dearly loved by the gods who married young were only taken by others equally beloved and exactly like their predecessors; puns disappeared gradually from the librettos; the frocks of the chorus exaggerated the fashion of the hour; very seldom a melody was sufficiently novel to escape being whistled by the town; but in the opening years of the twentieth century the Vanity was intrinsically what the Vanity had been thirty years before and what no doubt it would be thirty years thence. The modish young men who applauded "Miss Elsie of Chelsea" sat in the stalls where their fathers and in some cases their grandfathers had applauded "Hamlet Up to Date." The fathers vowed that the Vanity had deteriorated since the days when mutton-chop whiskers were cultivated and the ladies of the chorus flirted bustles on the outside of a coach-and-four; but the sons were quite content with the present régime and considered jolly old John Richards as good as any impresario of the 'eighties. Unless the standard of beauty had universally declined at the dawn of the new century, that opinion of youth must be indorsed; it is doubtful if twenty more beautiful girls than the Vanity chorus contained in the autumn of 1903 could have been found in any other city or in any other country, and certainly not in any other theater. When a few years after this date John Richards was knighted for his services to human nature and applied to the College of Heralds for a grant of arms, a friend with a taste for Latin robbed Propertius for the motto and gave him _Tot milia formosarum_, which, though lending itself to a ribald translation of "The foremost harem of smiling Totties," was not less well deserved by John Richards than by Pluto, to whom the poet addressed the original observation.