Playhouse, and the several Stages of Life,' the humour of which is unconscious. The writer, though astonished at the prodigies, realised that 'the entertainment was not adapted to my understanding, but to my senses; and my senses were indeed captivated with every object of delight.' At the end came a moral. The play is now over, the powers of the mind are exhausted, and intellectual pleasure and pain are almost at an end. The last stage, the stage of dotage, remains, and this is the pantomime of life.'

Various circumstances confined pantomime to dumbshow. In particular there were Acts of Parliament which, originating in theatrical jealousies, made it a severe offence for pantomimics to utter words except to music. And though these laws did not apply to Covent Garden and Drury Lane, those royal theatres obeyed them because their harlequins and clowns had to be drawn from the other houses. This discipline was excellent. Trained even more rigorously than are cinema actors to express themselves without words, the performers were forced to understand the essence of their craft. Naturally, those were the great days of pantomime, though even at the beginning of the 19th century the restriction was already in trifling ways ignored. Whereas twenty or thirty years before then a theatre had to close because a clown shouted Roast beef!' the immunity of the patent theatres was now encouraging his fellows to 'gag' occasionally. Leigh Hunt tells us that Grimaldi's talking was 'so rare and seasonable that it only proved the rule by the exception.' Yet that was the thin edge of the wedge. Clowns would keep on saying at every turn, 'Hullo!' or 'Don't!' or 'What do you mean?' This, said Leigh Hunt, only makes one think that the piece is partly written and not written well.' In consequence, the managers decided that their Christmas shows should be written, and instituted the change which really was the cause of the decline of pantomime to-day.

The decay was at first almost imperceptible. For that reason, its progress can only be traced in the 'books of words' or in newspaper files, and not in the statements of critics. Byron, as one example, sneered

even at 'Mother Goose,' and the review contributed by Keats to 'The Champion' of 'Harlequin's Vision' is contemptuous; whilst Lamb, who wrote delightfully of his first pantomimes as 'all an enchantment and a dream,' had nothing to say of those he might have witnessed in his later years. Leigh Hunt's joy in the harlequinade is, however, almost unbounded. He speaks of Harlequin dashing 'through the window like a swallow,' of that 'hobbling old rascal' Pantaloon and of Columbine as 'always the little dove who is to be protected.' On the other hand, Hazlitt gives his readers the impression that, as a schoolboy home from the holidays, he must have worked out the philosophy of his Christmas amusement. Those authorities saw pantomime in its prime; yet the enthusiasm they share for it cannot compare with that shown by those who saw pantomime in its decline. This strange fact is explained when we realise that Dickens and Thackeray were thinking of the Christmas of their boyhood. The delights-the ten thousand million delights of a pantomime' were remembered by Boz when he thought of the show that came lumbering down on Richardson's waggons at fairtime':

'What words can describe the deep gloom of the opening scene, where a crafty magician holding a young lady in bondage was discovered, studying an enchanted book to the soft music of a gong!-or in what terms can we express the thrill of ecstasy with which, his magic power opposed by superior art, we beheld the monster himself converted into Clown! What mattered it that the stage was three yards wide, and four deep?-we never saw it.'

Similarly, when Thackeray just before his death was writing of pantomime in the 'Cornhill,' it was not of the current performances, whose quality was causing a noticeable falling off in popular favour, but of a show 'at the Fancy,' where Grimaldi's name was still in the bill. He called his imaginary entertainment, Harlequin Hamlet, or Daddy's Ghost and Nunky's Pison,' and concluded, 'That Ophelia should be turned into Columbine was to be expected; but I confess I was a little shocked when Hamlet's mother became Pantaloon, and was instantly knocked down by Clown Claudius.'

From such affectionate regard pantomime passed by

stages into the fiercely critical gaze of champions of Ibsen. Mr William Archer, for one, produced a revolution of taste, as any one can see, who cares to compare his writings of one Christmas with the changes made at Drury Lane the next. Then came Mr Bernard Shaw with the forcible thrust of What the pantomime actually does is to abuse the Christmas toleration of dullness, senselessness, vulgarity and extravagance to a degree utterly incredible by people who have never been inside a theatre.' No doubt, denunciation was needed. No doubt, the making of pantomime was a craft that had gone awry. Yet it is not possible to agree that the ills would have been remedied, as these critics suggested, by the introduction of a literary flavour-have we not seen what Sir James Barrie made of a revue ?

Nevertheless, there is still enough genius in London to bring the past pleasures of Christmas back to the theatre. With Mr Granville Barker as producer, Lopokova as Columbine, Idzikovsky as Harlequin, Leslie Henson, a born mime, as Scaramouch, and Massine to design the plot, the nucleus of an exquisite amusement could be formed. Or do we ask of the theatre too much?

M. WILLSON DISHER.

Art. 3. THE ULSTER PLANTATION.

1. An Historical Account of the Plantation in Ulster at the commencement of the Seventeenth Century. By Nicholas Pynnar. Originally printed in Harris' Hibernica,' 1747. Edited by the Rev. George Hill. Belfast: McCaw, 1877.

2. The County of Londonderry in Three Centuries. By J. W. Kernohan. Belfast, 1921. 3. The Irish Rebellion of 1641; with a events which led up to and succeeded it.

History of the
Murray, 1921.

It is singular that a whole generation of English journalists, who have discussed the position of Ulster from every conceivable point of view and in accord with their varying political opinions, should never by sign or word in all these long years have evinced the slightest interest in the origin of this great and powerful colony. One is moved to the conclusion that they know nothing about it-an incredible supposition, if it were not for one or two astonishing revelations to the contrary. A leading Liberal journal, which has lectured and abused the Northern Protestants for the past ten years, recently published a cartoon depicting Cromwell expressing a pious regret that he had ever 'discovered Ulster!' A distinguished jurist and politician, formerly a strong supporter of Ulster, informed a crowded meeting recently that the Ulster Plantation was the work of Scots and Welsh, apparently mixing up Strongbow and James I! At any rate, it is tolerably obvious that the would-be directors of British opinion on this burning subject, have never even heard of Pynnar's Survey, the Domesday Book of the Ulster Plantation, so ably edited by Mr Hill, admirably printed and readily accessible. Sometimes these people are vaguely alluded to as of wholly Scottish descent. The Americans, who, fortunately for their country, and that, too, before the Revolutionary war, received about 100,000 of these hardy, industrious souls, invariably refer to them and to their descendants as Scotch-Irish, as opposed to the other Irish, a comparatively modern influx. This, however, for the good reason that it was chiefly the Scottish Presbyterians who had then good cause to leave Ireland.

With the turbulent period, which resulted in the escheating and the acquisition by the Crown of the lands of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel, and half a dozen smaller chiefs, we have no concern here. It will be enough to say that their estates comprised the six counties of Donegal, Coleraine (to be re-named Derry), Tyrone, Fermanagh, Armagh, and Cavan. The northeast corner of the Province, the counties of Antrim and Down, were not included in the Plantation. Long before this time, these two counties had acquired such affiliation with western Scotland by natural intercourse, both peaceful and warlike, and by private adventure, as to prepare the ground for a steady stream of spontaneous immigration from all parts of southern Scotland. This wide-spread origin was fortunate, for the west-coast Gaels, undiluted with stiffer and more civilised elements, might have proved, and indeed on occasions had proved, as troublesome to the British Government as the Irish Celts they displaced. In brief, Antrim and Down may be fairly regarded as ethnologically Scottish colonies; and with the complications of their further development we are not here concerned. Monaghan, too, was planted independently and has a little story to itself.

In 1608, after the flight of the earls, the ground of the six counties, from the Crown point of view, was now, save the Church lands, all cleared of ownership; and the moment was ripe for the colonisation scheme which had been long in the air. There was already a swarm of soldiers in Ireland, who had fought through seven years of war in the full hopes of reward out of the confiscated lands. It was a period of high adventure, stimulated by what seemed at the time a lack of opportunities at home. John Smith and his companions were struggling with the beginnings of Virginia. New England was being written up by distinguished navigators; and Ireland, so close at home and occupied by a mainly pastoral people, who seemed to the English almost savages, must have had immense fascinations. Intending colonists this side the Channel were astir; and the old soldiers in Ireland, then known as servitors, were all agog and more than suspicious of the King. James had in fact harboured some fatal notion of giving large grants to certain Scottish nobles, who would have shipped over