mentors, the critics, are not trustworthy guides.  The public must, after all, decide the fate of a new play.  If it be bad, the Englishman of to-day will not declare it is good because the newspapers have told him so.  He will be disappointed, he will be bored, he will tell his friends so, and the bad piece will fail to draw audiences.  If, on the other hand, the play is a good one, which has been condemned by the Press, it will quicken the pulse and stir the heart of an audience in spite of adverse criticism.  The report that it contains the true ring will go about, and success must follow.  In a word, though the Press can do very much to further the interests of the stage, it is powerless to kill good work, and cannot galvanize that which is invertebrate into life.”

To determine Mary Anderson’s true stage place, and to make a fair and impartial criticism of her performances is rendered further difficult by the fact, that the English stage offers in the last generation scarcely one with whom she can be compared, if we except perhaps Helen Faucit.  Between herself and that great artist, middle-aged play-goers seem to find a certain resemblance; but to the present generation of playgoers Mary Anderson is an absolutely new revelation on the London boards.  Recalling the roll of artists who have essayed similar parts for the last five and twenty years, we can name not one who has given as she did what we may best describe as a new stage sensation.  Never was the pride of a free maiden of ancient Greece more nobly expressed than in Parthenia:  never were the gradual steps from fear and abhorrence to love more finely portrayed than in the stages of her rising passion for the savage chieftain, whose captive hostage she was.  Her Pauline was the old patrician beauty of France living on the stage, a true woman in spite of the selfish veneer of pride and caste with which the traditions of the ancient noblesse had covered her; while Galatea found in her certainly the most poetic and beautiful representation of that fanciful character, ever seen on any stage.  This was the verdict of the public who thronged the Lyceum to its utmost capacity, during the months of the past winter.  This was the verdict, too, of the largest provincial towns of the kingdom.  The critics, some of them, were willing to concede to Mary Anderson the possession of every grace which can adorn a woman, and of every qualification which can make an artist attractive, with a solitary but fatal reservation—­she was devoid of genius.  But what, indeed, is genius after all?  It is the magic power to touch unerringly a sympathetic chord in the human breast.  The novelist, whose characters seem to be living; the painter, the figures on whose canvas appear to breathe; the actor who, while he treads the stage, is forgotten in the character he assumes; all these possess it.  This was the verdict of the public upon Mary Anderson, and we are fain to believe that—­pace