Shakespeare, abounding in petty details, is at the same time, and for that very reason, imposing by the grandeur of the _ensemble._ It is the oak which casts a most extensive shadow with its myriads of slender leaves.
Let us hope that people in France will ere long become accustomed to devote a whole evening to a single play.

In England and Germany there are plays that last six hours.

The Greeks, about whom we hear so much, the Greeks--and after the fashion of Scuderi we will cite at this point the classicist Dacier, in the seventh chapter of his _Poetics_--the Greeks sometimes went so far as to have twelve or sixteen plays acted in a single day.

Among a people who are fond of spectacles the attention is more lively than is commonly believed The _Mariage de Figaro_, the connecting link of Beaumarchais's great trilogy, occupies the whole evening, and who was ever bored or fatigued by it Beaumarchais was worthy to venture on the first step toward that goal of modern art at which it will be impossible to arrive in two hours, that profound, insatiable interest which results from a vast, lifelike and multiform plot.

"But," someone will say, "this performance, consisting of a single play, would be monotonous, would seem terribly long"-- Not so.