be told how
perfect a sham any pretence of examination must have been under such
circumstances. When this pretence had been gone through, the bones
were cast back again into the marble sarcophagus by the workman,
"like"--as one eye-witness of the scene describes it--"the bones of
dogs." And when the same person looked into the sarcophagus after this
tossing back had been effected, he saw a mere confused heap of the
scattered bones of two skeletons undistinguishably mixed together. "I
cannot help," writes the same eye-witness, "expressing my sense of the
barbaric acts which I witnessed. Historic skeletons--the father of
Catherine de' Medici, the son-in-law of Charles V.; Florentine
nobles--one a duke of Florence, the other of Urbino--both bad enough
fellows, no doubt, but could any Communists have acted worse? Besides,
Communist mobs assert principles, and do these things in hot blood.
But this most monstrous outrage was committed coolly by pure stupidity
and the carelessness which cannot be moved by any consideration to
take any trouble that can by any possibility be avoided. Had they
turned up a quantity of the bones of animals to examine them, they
could not have done worse." It is fair to add that _some_ of the
organs of the Florentine press stigmatized the proceedings upon this
occasion as they deserved to be stigmatized.

T.A.T.

T.W. ROBERTSON.

The qualifications needed by the novelist and by the dramatist are at
once alike and unlike. Differing in manner rather than in matter, they
are rarely found united in one man. Scott, from whose novels many
stirring plays have been taken, was incapable of writing one himself;
Thackeray, even after he was the well-known author of _Vanity Fair_,
could not find a manager willing to produce his comedy; and
Thackeray's great master, Fielding, comparatively failed as a
dramatist, though Joseph Surface is Blifil and Charles Surface is Tom
Jones, and from the same work Colman derived his comedy of the
_Jealous Wife_, which holds the stage to this day. By dint of hard
work a man might make himself a novelist, but the dramatist, like the
poet, must be born. He who possesses the power of writing successfully
for the stage will surely show it in his first work. This theory
accounts for the signal success of the _Cantab_, a slight farce played
in 1861 at the London Strand Theatre. The material was weak and
worn-out, but the fun was not forced: it flowed naturally from the