with an extraordinary luxuriance, mushroom
like, has created a call for actors, who are not
sufficiently numerous to supply the demand.
The trained soldiers, tempted by higher pay,
have deserted from their old corps. They find
that there is not much interest in the pieces
where their real strength lies, and they have
set themselves to learn a new drill. Hence the
older "schools," the brave artists who have acted
together so many years, knowing each other's
"ways" by heart, have found new companions.
Each house is fast losing, or has lost, its
distinctive character.

The system of having the prompter's box in
the centre of the stage, as at the opera, may
have its advantages. It may, however, be open
to the objection that it would make the actor less
inclined to rely on his own resources, being thus
secure of support in every possible way. It is
characteristic, however, that it should be
rendered necessary by those great spectacular
pieces, where it is more requisite to see the
prompter, his motions, and directions, than to
hear the text. It might be introduced in the
case of veteran actors who are not well up
in their parts, as in the instance of Frederic
Lemaitre, the very lees and dregs of whose
acting are more precious than the choice
runnings of the best existing histrionics. This
wonderful genius, for all his decay, his haltings,
his failing memory and powers, still left
the impression on one who had never seen him
before, of great and unconventional gifts, and of
a round and distinct character, which remains
present to the mind long after. With that
exquisite art which is French, and French only,
he had been nicely and accurately fitted with a
part that suited him exactly; an old schoolmaster,
gentle and pastoral, and whose whole
life has been coloured by the memory of a
loved wife, who died years before. This
bereavement has given a gentle and childish
tone to his mind; but later he discovers
suddenly that she had been unfaithful to him.
This shock unsettles his reason, and at the
scene where he makes the discovery, and begins
to wander, singing snatches of an old song, and
then suddenly turning to fury, it was possible
to form a perfect notion of what the old Frederic
was. Further on, when his little scholars
gather round him, and ask him if he did not
remember them, one of our conventionals
would have had his regular round of business
ready—an immense deal of passing hands over
the face, of tossing back his hair, of looking up at
the clouds, of rolling the eye, finishing perhaps
with a grin and much shaking of the head.
Not so this great actor. He gave a little start
as he was addressed, looked eagerly but
naturally at the questioners with a puzzled air, and
then said, with an indescribable half-sad, half-
vexed tone, "No, dears, I do not know you."

In this piece was a new scenic device which
may be commended heartily to the professors
and mechanicians of sensation carpentry. The
programme was that a gentleman was to pay a
farewell visit to a lady whom he admired, at
midnight, and was then to be assassinated as he
came away by an outside gallery and stairs
which led down into the garden. It is scarcely
necessary to add that the lady was not single.
The lover was, indeed, a tall man, of a vast girth
round the waist, which, as he came to pay
his addresses in a scarlet tightly-buttoned
hunting-coat and buckskins, had an almost
ludicrous effect. But, to use the French idiom,
"That does not hinder"—sentiment fines down
even exaggerated corpulence, and on all sides
was heard, "O mon dieu, qu'il est charmant!
Comme il est noble!" &c. The room in which
he took this midnight farewell was semi-
circular, and filled the whole stage; but when
he had passed out, it all began to glide away
slowly to the right, the prostrate lady lying
overwhelmed with grief; and then the outside
front gallery, flight of stairs, and garden itself
began to come into view, and the next
moment, when the room had finally disappeared,
the escaping lover made his appearance on the
outside stairs, descended in the usual guilty
fashion, and was duly shot. This striking effect
produced a hurricane of applause, and was talked
of everywhere as the "chambre à roulettes"—
the room on casters.

LUNAR ASSISTANCE.

SUPPOSE for a moment, that we are all
transported to the bottom of the sea, there to occupy
a position analogous, in respect to the waters
of the ocean, to the position we hold in the
lowest portion of the atmosphere. How can
we form any idea of the tides that ebb and
flow above us? Our only way of obtaining
cognisance of the fact would be to measure the
thickness of the mass of water overhead, by
means of some instrument analogous to the
barometer.

Let us now go up again to the surface of the
earth—to the bottom of the aërial ocean which
covers the whole earth. The same observations,
made with the barometer, acquaint us with the
existence of tides in the atmosphere. But here
we have a continuous ocean, whose oscillations,
restrained by no barrier, are not amplified by
confinement in a narrow channel, as happens in the
ocean of waters, through the resistance which
continents oppose to their movements. We
have, moreover, an ocean consisting of a fluid
incomparably less dense than the waters of the
sea. Taking these circumstances into consideration,
we find that the periodical variations of
pressure due to the tides of the atmosphere
ought to occasion, in the height of the
barometric column, variations amounting, at most,
to the fiftieth part of an inch!

What now, of lunar influence upon the
weather? Daily observations show that, in
the same place, the height of the mercury in
the barometer may vary by a quarter of an inch
and more, without any great disturbances
ensuing. If the tides in the atmosphere, caused
by the moon, have any share in these variations,