the business may very well end.  The men of the music hall live, as I have said, entirely in a dull convention; and, if a set of thorough artists were to portray them exactly, no one would be more surprised than the folk whose portraits were taken.  The gentlemen who are resolved to regenerate the music-hall stage persist in not considering the audience; and yet, when all is said and done, the poor stupid audience should be considered a little.  If we played Browning’s “Strafford” for them, how much would they be “raised”?  They would not laugh, they would not yawn; they would be stupefied, and a trifle insulted.  Give them a good silly swinging chorus about some subject connected with the tender affections, and let the refrain run to a waltz rhythm or to a striking drawl, and they are satisfied in mind and rejoice exceedingly.  The finer class of people in the East-end of London seem to enjoy the very noblest and even the most abstruse of sacred music at the Sunday concerts; but it will be long before the music-hall audiences are educated up even to the standard of those crowds who come off the Whitechapel pavements to hear Handel.  We cannot hurry them:  why try?  Their lives are very hard, and, when the brief gleam comes on the evening of evenings in the week, we should be content with ensuring them decency, safety, order, and let them enjoy their own entertainment in their own way.  A thoroughly prosaic and logical preacher might say to those poor souls with perfect truth, “Why do you waste time in coming here to see things which are done much better in the streets?  You roar and cheer and stamp when you see a real cab-horse come across from the wings, and yet in an hour you might watch a hundred cabs pass you in the street and you would not cheer the least bit.  You hear a costermonger on the stage say, ’Give me my ’umble fireside, and let my good old missus ‘and me my cup o’ tea and my ‘ard-earned bit o’ bread, and all the dooks and lords in Hengland ain’t nothin’ to me!’—­you hear that, and you know quite well that no costermonger on this goodly earth ever talked in that way, and still you cheer.  You like only what is unreal, and, when you are shown a character which is supposed in some mysterious way to resemble you, you are more than delighted, and you applaud a thing which is either a silly caricature or an utterly foolish libel.”  The poor and lowly personage thus hailed with cutting denunciation and logic might say, “Please mind your own business.  Do you pay my sixpence for the gallery?  No; I find it myself, and I come to have my bit of fun with my own money, in my own place, at my own price.  I have enough of workshops and streets and what you call real things; so, when I come out to the play, I want them all unreal, and as unreal as possible.  Monday morning’s time enough to go back to reality.”  As often as ever fussy reformers try to do more than ensure propriety in theatres, so often will they be beaten; and I am quite sure that, if any attempt is