of Homer and of the tragedians, and who has not thus taken
in by the pores the subtle essence of Hellenic life and literature, can
truly appreciate this French farce. Planche's _Golden Fleece_ is in the
same vein, but the ore is not as rich. Frere's _Loves of the Triangles_
and some of his _Anti-Jacobin_ writing are perhaps as good in quality,
but the subjects are inferior and temporary. Scarron's vulgar burlesques
and the cheap parodies of many contemporary English play-makers are not
to be mentioned in the same breath with this scholarly fooling. There is
something in the French genius akin to the Greek, and here was a Gallic
wit who could turn a Hellenic love-tale inside out, and wring the
uttermost drop of fun from it without recourse to the devices of the
booth at the fair, the false nose and the simulation of needless
ugliness. The French play, comic as it was, did not suggest hysteria or
epilepsy, and it was not so lacking in grace that we could not recall
the original story without a shudder. There is no shattering of an
ideal, and one cannot reproach the authors of the _Belle Helene_ with
what Theophrastus Such calls "debasing the moral currency, lowering the
value of every inspiring fact and tradition."

Surpassed only by the _Belle Helene_ is the _Grande Duchesse de
Gerolstein_. It is nearly fifteen years since all the world went to
Paris to see an Exposition Universelle and to gaze at the "sabre de mon
pere," and since a Russian emperor, going to hear the operetta, said to
have been suggested by the freak of a Russian empress, sat incognito in
one stage-box of the little Varietes Theatre, and glancing up saw a
Russian grand duke in the other. It is nearly fifteen years since the
tiny army of Her Grand-ducal Highness took New York by storm, and since
American audience after audience hummed its love for the military and
walked from the French Theatre along Fourteenth street to Delmonico's to
supper, sabring the waiters there with the venerated weapon of her sire.
The French Theatre is no more, and Delmonico's is no longer at that
Fourteenth-street corner, and Her Highness Mademoiselle Tostee is dead,
and M. Offenbach's sprightly tunes have had the fate of all over-popular
airs, and are forgotten now. _Ou sont les neiges d'antan?_

It has been said that the authors regretted having written the _Grande
Duchesse_, because the irony of history soon made a joke on Teutonic
powers and principalities seem like unpatr