is slain--Tybalt or her husband; she is sure to know some time; it
can wait.

A London success, when you know where it lies, is not difficult to
achieve. Of all things that can be gained by men or women about their
business, there is one thing that can be gained without fear of failure.
This is time. To gain time requires so little wit that, except for
competition, every one could be first at the game. In fact, time gains
itself. The actor is really not called upon to do anything. There is
nothing, accordingly, for which our actors and actresses do not rely upon
time. For humour even, when the humour occurs in tragedy, they appeal to
time. They give blanks to their audiences to be filled up.

It might be possible to have tragedies written from beginning to end for
the service of the present kind of "art." But the tragedies we have are
not so written. And being what they are, it is not vivacity that they
lose by this length of pause, this length of phrasing, this illimitable
tiresomeness; it is life itself. For the life of a scene conceived
directly is its directness; the life of a scene created simply is its
simplicity. And simplicity, directness, impetus, emotion, nature fall
out of the trailing, loose, long dialogue, like fish from the loose
meshes of a net--they fall out, they drift off, they are lost.

The universal slowness, moreover, is not good for metre. Even when an
actress speaks her lines as lines, and does not drop into prose by
slipping here and there a syllable, she spoils the _tempo_ by inordinate
length of pronunciation. Verse cannot keep upon the wing without a
certain measure in the movement of the pinion. Verse is a flight.

GRASS

Now and then, at regular intervals of the summer, the Suburb springs for
a time from its mediocrity; but an inattentive eye might not see why, or
might not seize the cause of the bloom and of the new look of humility
and dignity that makes the Road, the Rise, and the Villas seem suddenly
gentle, gay and rather shy.

It is no change in the gardens. These are, as usual, full, abundant,
fragrant, and quite uninteresting, keeping the traditional secret by
which the suburban rose, magnolia, clematis, and all other flowers grow
dull--not in colour, but in spirit--between the yellow brick house-front
and the iron railings. Nor is there anything altered for the better in
the houses themselves.

Nevertheless, the little, common, prosperous road, has b