sub-editor’s room, try his hand first of all at reviewing books, and then turn him on to dramatic and musical criticism!  Occasionally a reporter, who has been round the police courts to get notes of the night charges, will drop into the theatre on his way to the office, and ’do a par.,’ as they call it.  Will you believe it possible that the things written of me by these persons—­with their pretentious airs of criticism, and their gross ignorance cropping up at every point—­have the power to vex and annoy me most terribly?  I laugh at the time, but the phrase rankles in my memory all the same.  One learned young man said of me the other day:  ’It is really distressing to mark the want of unity in her artistic characterizations when one regards the natural advantages that nature has heaped upon her with no sparing hand.’  The natural advantages that nature has heaped upon me!  ‘And perhaps, also,’ he went on to say, ’Miss White would do well to pay some little more attention before venturing on pronouncing the classic names of Greece.  Iphigenia herself would not have answered to her name if she had heard it pronounced with the accent on the fourth syllable.’”

Macleod brought his fist down on the table with a bang.

“If I had that fellow,” said he, aloud—­“if I had that fellow, I should like to spin for a shark off Dubh Artach lighthouse.”  And here a most unholy vision rose before him of a new sort of sport—­a sailing launch going about six knots an hour, a goodly rope at the stern with a huge hook through the gill of the luckless critic, a swivel to make him spin, and then a few smart trips up and down by the side of the lonely Dubh Artach rocks, where Mr. Ewing and his companions occasionally find a few sharks coming up to the surface to stare at them.

“Is it not too ridiculous that such things should vex me—­that I should be so absolutely at the mercy of the opinion of people whose judgment I know to be absolutely valueless?  I find the same thing all around me.  I find a middle-aged man, who knows his work thoroughly, and has seen all the best actors of the past quarter of a century, will go about quite proudly with a scrap of approval from some newspaper, written by a young man who has never travelled beyond the suburbs of his native town, and has seen no acting beyond that of the local company.  But there is another sort of critic—­the veteran, the man who has worked hard on the paper and worn himself out, and who is turned off from politics, and pensioned by being allowed to display his imbecility in less important matters.  Oh dear! what lessons he reads you!  The solemnity of them!  Don’t you know that at the end of the second act the business of Mrs. So-and-So (some actress who died when George IV. was king) was this, that, or the other?—­and how dare you, you impertinent minx, fly in the face of well-known stage traditions?  I have been introduced lately to a specimen of both classes.  I think the young man—­he had beautiful long fair