Ellis,
Lady Duff-Gordon, and Paul Poiret have done their bit for the dresses.
In fact, my dear young man--who are reading this article--you will
feel just as tenderly in twenty years about the _Follies of 1917_ as
your father does now about _Wang_. Only, and this is a very big ONLY,
the _Follies of 1917_, depending as it does entirely on topical
subjects and dimpled knees, cannot be revived. Fervid and enlivening
as its immediate impression may be it cannot be lasting. You can never
recapture the thrills of this summer by sitting in Row A, Seat No. 1
at any 1937 _reprise_. There can never be anything of the sort. The
revue, like the firefly, is for a night only. We take it in with the
daily papers ... and the next season, already old-fashioned, it goes
forth to show Grinnell and Davenport how Mlle. Manhattan deported
herself the year before.

So if the youth of these days chooses to be sentimental in the years
to come over the good old days of Urban scenery and Olive Thomas, the
Balloon Girls of the Midnight Frolic and the chorus of the Winter
Garden, he will be obliged to give way to the mood at home in front of
the fire, see the pictures in the smoke, and hear the tunes in the
dropping of the coals. Which is perhaps as it should be. For in 1937
the youth of that epoch can sit in Row A, Seat No. 1 himself and not
be ousted from his place by a sentimental gentleman of middle age who
longs to hear _Poor Butterfly_ again.

_April 25, 1917._

Two Young American Playwrights

_"Gautier had a theory to the effect that to be a member of
the Academy was simply and solely a matter of
predestination. 'There is no need to do anything,' he would
say, 'and so far as the writing of books is concerned that
is entirely useless. A man is born an Academician as he is
born a bishop or a cook. He can abuse the Academy in a dozen
pamphlets if it amuses him, and be elected all the same; but
if he is not predestined, three hundred volumes and ten
masterpieces, recognized as such by the genuflections of an
adoring universe, will not aid him to open its doors.'
Evidently Balzac was not predestined but then neither was
Moliere, and there must have been some consolation for him
in that."_

Edgar Saltus.

Two Young American Playwrights

In the newspaper reports relating to the death of Auguste Rodin I read
with some astonishment tha