triumph of tact and ingenuity, the devotion to conventionalism, either
pedantry or the genius of the hour, also rules the drama in Paris. With
all its brilliancy, entertainment, grace, wit, and popularity,--there
exists not a permanently vital and universally recognized type of this
greatest department of literature, familiar and endeared alike to
peasant and peer, a representative of humanity for all time,--like the
bard around whose name and words cluster the Anglo-Saxon hearts and
intelligence from generation to generation.

But nowhere do life and the drama so trench upon each other; nowhere is
every incident of experience so dramatic. Miss H.M. Williams told the
poet Rogers that she had seen "men and women, waiting for admission at
the door of the theatre, suddenly leave their station, on the passing of
a set of wretches going to be guillotined, and then, having ascertained
that none of their relations or friends were among them, very
unconcernedly return to the door of the theatre." A child is born at the
Opera Comique during the performance, and it is instantly made an event
of sympathy and effect by the audience; a subscription is raised, the
child named for the dramatic heroine of the moment, and the fortunate
mother sent home in a carriage, amid the plaudits of the crowd. You are
listening to a play; and a copy of the "Entr'acte" is thrust into your
hand, containing a minute account of the death of a statesman two
squares off whose name fills pages of history, or a battle in the East,
where some officer whom you met two months before on the Boulevard has
won immortal fame by prodigies of valor. So do the actualities and the
pastimes, the real and the imaginary drama, miraculously interfuse at
Paris; the comedy of life is patent there, and often the spectator
exclaims, "_Arlequin avait bien arrange les choses, mais Colombine
derange tout!_"