But it is time to go home.  The moon is waning:  suadentque cadentia sidera somnum, if only there were any hope of being able to be persuaded by their reasonable suggestions.  But truly the town seems to afford little hope of it.  We make our way out of the crowd with some difficulty and more patience, and are sensible of a colder nip in the January night-air as we emerge from it into the neighboring streets.  But even there, though the racket gradually becomes less as we leave the piazza behind us, there is in every street the braying of those abominable tin trumpets, and we shall probably turn wearily in our beds at three or four in the morning and thank Heaven that the Befana visits us but once a year.

T.A.T.

ERNESTO ROSSI.

The stage of Paris has long been conceded to be the first in the world.  In France the player is not only born—­he must be made.  Before the embryo performer achieves the honors of a public debut he has been trained in the classes of the Conservatoire to declaim the verse of Racine and to lend due point and piquancy to the prose of Moliere.  He is taught to tread in the well-beaten path of French dramatic art, fenced in and hedged around with sacred traditions.  If he attempts to embody any one of the characters of the classic drama, every tone, every gesture, every peculiarity of make-up, every shade and style in his costume, is prescribed to him beforehand.  Originality of treatment and of conception is above all things to be avoided.  So spoke Moliere, so looked Lekain, so stepped Talma; therefore all the succeeding generations of players must so speak and look and walk.  Let us imagine the process transferred to our English stage—­the shades of Burbage and Betterton prescribing how Hamlet and Richard III. should be played—­the manners of the seventeenth century forcibly transferred to our modern stage.  The process would be intolerable.  Worse still, it would have the effect on our comparatively undramatic race of crushing out every spark of originality and of wholly hindering the development of histrionic talent.  With the French such results are happily, to a certain extent, impossible.  There is scarcely any French man or woman of ordinary intelligence who does not possess sufficient capacity for acting to be capable of being trained into a very fair performer.  The preponderance of beautiful women on the French stage above those to be found in other stations of life may be accounted for on the ground that any young girl of the lower classes possessing extraordinary beauty and ordinary intelligence can readily, from the bent of her national characteristics, be trained into an actress.  But while the high-comedy theatres and those of the melodrama flourish, there can be no doubt but that the highest type of acting finds no chance for development in France.  The actor who possesses one spark of genius soon escapes from the galling fetters of classicism and tradition, and takes refuge in comedy or in melodrama.  Thus did Frederic Lemaitre in his prime, and thus, too, in later days, did the accomplished and brilliant Lafontaine.