LACK'S the hall of the Old
Men's Christian Association. With that exception there is, as somebody
said about something, absolutely nothing to offend the most fastidious.
Any person who exhibits excitement upon the stage is discharged at the
end of the week with a pension. Miss MOORE is permitted to weep, but she
does it so quietly and nicely that it does not disturb anybody. And the
ushers have received strict orders to eject anybody in the audience who
manifests any marked interest in the performance. A friend of mine from
Peoria once went to WALLACK'S, and took no pains whatever to conceal his
admiration of the acting. On the contrary, at a particularly nice point,
he actually clapped his hands together twice. Of course he was arrested
for breach of the peace, and locked up over night. But the management
declined, to prosecute when it was represented to them that the man had
lately seen McKEAN BUCHANAN at the Peoria Academy of Music, and that he
could not help testifying his gratification that LESTER WALLACK behaved
so differently, and he was discharged. He went back to Peoria, and told
his neighbors that there was a place in New York where they got up a
yawning match (this coarse person called it a "gaping bee") every night
between the stage and the audience, and the stage always won.

Now we know, that is those of us who are in good society, that what this
uncouth rustic mistook for indifference is the air of society.
TALLEYRAND said, or somebody said he said, that the use of language was
to conceal thought. Go to WALLACK'S and you will see that the art of
acting is to suppress emotions. Everything is below concert-pitch,
except perhaps the orchestra, which insists upon playing lively and
popular music, instead of doing the Dead March in Saul for a funeral
procession while the audience files out dreamily to drink, and empties
some dull opiate to the drains. The entire audience are making heroic
efforts all through the play to prevent each other from seeing that they
know they are listening to the most finished acting to be seen anywhere,
and looking at the prettiest stage pictures ever set. All the actors are
all the while trying to conceal the fact that they are doing any good
acting. The whole theatre is in a condition of sweet repose, like the
placid bosom of a mill-pond on a summer afternoon, when STODDART shoots
the Dam.

Well, when you have society theatres, where they do this sort of thing,
you must have soc