But the modern dramas and comedies are acted, even in the smaller parts, with admirable intelligence and effect, and we may add that the vice that disgraced the stage of the past is by no means so visible in the theatre of the present. The coarseness that clung so long to the theatre is gradually disappearing, and the theatre-goers of to-day have discovered that the theatre, which was created to entertain the world, can do so without recourse to vulgarity. The theatres of the United States are the handsomest and most convenient in the world. This Mme. Sarah Bernhardt acknowledged the other day, while criticising the theatres of Paris, which lack many conveniences. Up to within twenty-five years of the close of the century, plays written by American authors were rare. Managers had to rely upon those composed in Europe. But at present the United States possesses many able and successful playwrights, just as it does its artists in all departments. There has not been a time during the century when the personal character of actors and actresses has escaped discussion, and sometimes violent criticism, by those prejudiced against the theatre. This does not seem to have lessened the estimation in which dramatic art is held, nor to have seriously diminished in number the legion who find in the drama their most pleasurable recreation and keenest intellectual delight. In answer to challenges of the morality of the stage, Bronson Howard has fittingly said: “I have never yet seen anybody who wanted a bad picture just because it was painted by a good man. It is society that corrupts the stage, not the stage that corrupts society.” THE CENTURY’S LITERATURE BY JAMES P. BOYD, A.M., L.B. In contrasting the world’s nineteenth century literature with that of the eighteenth, one is impressed with the many remarkable differences. But by no means all of such differences are to the discredit of the older literature. As instances, the prose literature of the nineteenth century may not surpass that of the eighteenth in elegance and accuracy of expression, though its progress has been very marked in the diversity of its applications to mental needs; and the poetical literature of the nineteenth century may not excel that of the eighteenth in beauty and virility, though it has advanced in loftiness of theme and tenderness of mode. And so, when literature is divided into its many minor branches, as history, philosophy, the sciences, etc., various features of the old compare favorably with the new.