mediocre plays she acts in, often without a single other actor or actress worth listening to. The starring system is essentially the development of all that is worst in the artist—vulgarity, crude bids for personal popularity, blighting vanity, and egotism; in a word, all the cheapest characteristics of the charlatan. It is precisely these ugly defects that such an institution as the Comédie Française tends to suppress. There the reputation of the company and not of the individual is at stake. Minor parts are played by eminent artists, and the excessive vanity and pretension of the one become the plague of the many. I will not advance the assertion that everybody in the famous company of the Comédie Française is equally admirable. Temperament will, of course, prompt your criticism. For instance, Mounet-Sully is the beloved of many a nation as well as of thousands of his own countrymen, and I can scarcely listen to Mounet-Sully with patience. A greater bore I cannot conceive. He belongs to the Byronic school, the days of cloaked and sabred romance. His sombre voice lifts itself on a volume of sound, and is flung in mournful and passionate reproach against the implacable walls of destiny. But yet in your most exasperated mood, with nerves on edge from his excess of clouded despair and desperate anguish, you must admit that the man is a perfect artist, and that such a
