THE DRAMA BARRED AT ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES.

Why should not Cambridge - or Oxford, for that matter - be allowed to enjoy theatrical performances in term time? This momentous question is once more being agitated at the former university, and the unhappy vice-chancellor, burdened as he is with the absurd privilege of deciding it, is being bombarded with petitions from the friends and enemies of the mimetic art. Placed in this trying situation, the vice-chancellor, in accordance with time-honored practice, will probably take the wrong view and deprive the 34,000 inhabitants of Cambridge of every opportunity of seeing plays, lest the tender and inexperienced minds of the undergraduates should be corrupted by sights which they of course, never have a chance of beholding elsewhere. There was a time, as some people may remember, when the introduction of railways into the sacred precincts of Alma Mater was considered equally dangerous to the purity of the undergraduate mind. The best of the joke is that though proper plays may be forbidden, it is probably not in the power of the vice-chancellor or any body else to stop the half-circus, half-music-hall performances which always step into the place of the ousted drama. - [Pall Mall Gazette.