There was a critic—a sincere and art-loving man—who flouted the mob's taste, who inveighed against the popular, who protested vigorously against the low, mean art form that in dramatic shape packed nightly the playhouses of the great city with the unesthetic, artistically depraved and vulgar bourgeoisie. That things should come to so unholy a pass, he sighed.

The critic never stopped to consider that the journal which he graced had in the great city a daily circulation of half a million.