iotic satire. Certainly, they
had no reason to be ashamed of the literary quality of their work: in
its class it yields only to its predecessor. There is no single figure
as fine as Calchas--General Boum is a coarser outline--but how humorous
and how firm is the drawing of Prince Paul and Baron Grog! And Her
Highness herself may be thought a cleverer sketch of youthful femininity
than even the Hellenic Helen. It is hard to judge the play now. Custom
has worn its freshness and made it too familiar: we know it too well to
criticise it clearly. Besides, the actors have now overlaid the action
with over-much "business." But in spite of these difficulties the merits
of the piece are sufficiently obvious: its constructive skill can be
remarked; the first act, for example, is one of the best bits of
exposition on the modern French stage.

Besides these plays for music, and besides the more important five-act
comedies to be considered later, MM. Meilhac and Halevy are the authors
of thirty or forty comic dramas--as they are called on the English
stage--or farce-comedies in one, two, three, four, and even five acts,
ranging in aim from the gentle satire of sentimentality in _La Veuve_ to
the outspoken farce of the _Reveillon_. Among the best of the longer of
these comic plays are _Tricoche et Cacolet_ and _La Boule_. Both were
written for the Palais Royal, and they are models of the new dramatic
species which came into existence at that theatre about twenty years
ago, as M. Francisquc Sarcey recently reminded us in his interesting
article on the Palais Royal in _The Nineteenth Century_. This new style
of comic play may be termed realistic farce--realistic, because it
starts from every-day life and the most matter-of-fact conditions; and
farce, because it uses its exact facts only to further its fantasy and
extravagance. Consider _La Boule_. Its first act is a model of accurate
observation; it is a transcript from life; it is an inside view of a
commonplace French household which incompatibility of temper has made
unsupportable. And then take the following acts, and see how on this
foundation of fact, and screened by an outward semblance of realism,
there is erected the most laughable superstructure of fantastic farce. I
remember hearing one of the two great comedians of the Theatre Francais,
M. Coquelin, praise a comic actor of the Varietes whom we had lately
seen in a rather cheap and flimsy farce, because he combined "la verite