itself the dead load is far in excess of any number of railway trains which could be brought upon the bridge. Thus the weight of one of the 1,700-feet spans is about 16,000 tons, and the heaviest rolling load would in practice be not more than a couple of coal trains weighing together, say, 800 tons, or only five per cent. of the dead weight. Wind is a more important element than train weight, and with the assumed pressure of 56 lbs. per square foot the estimated lateral pressure on each 1,700 feet span is 2,000 tons, or two and a half times as much as the rolling load. To resist wind the structure is 'straddle-legged,' that is, the lofty columns over the piers are 120 feet apart at the base and 33 feet at the top. Similarly the cantilever bottom members widen out at the piers. To convey an idea of the enormous forces which the cantilevers are capable of resisting it may be stated that a pull of 45,000 tons would be required to tear asunder the top ties, whilst the greatest pull from passing trains would be less than 2,000 tons.

Expansion and contraction of the huge mass of metal have been carefully provided for. The steel superstructure is not rigidly bolted to the masonry, but is free to slide within certain limits under heavy wind pressure or large variations of temperature. Perfect freedom of movement in the 1,700-feet span is attained by resting one end of the central girder on a rocking column, and the rails here are free to slide to the extent of eighteen inches under changes of temperature.

One of the chief advantages of the cantilever system is facility and safety of erection, as such bridges can be erected by commencing at the piers and adding successive bays of the cantilever right and left until the whole is complete. There is thus no moment of insecurity when the safety of the whole structure is dependent upon the integrity of some temporary staging springing from the bed of the river, and liable to be carried away by storm or flood. As a result of experience at the Forth Bridge, not a single bolt has been disturbed by the heaviest storms which have occurred during the erection of the bridge. Although at times the idea has been prevalent that the accidents to workmen at the Forth Bridge were notably great, the fact is that the reverse is the case. The total loss of life in the past six years amongst the two thousand to four thousand workmen has been less than two-thirds of that resulting from the single act of oversight or carelessness at Armagh the other day. Hundreds of the Forth Bridge workmen have proved themselves to be as hardy and plucky a set of men as could ever have existed in past times. Only a fine line divides praiseworthy daring from reprehensible recklessness, and it is certainly not for the general public to bring a charge of recklessness against the Forth Bridge workmen, as witness the loss of life every year at level crossings on railways. It takes just about five seconds to walk across a railway, and yet last year over one hundred people selected the very five seconds when trains were passing to attempt

the feat, and failed-so the less said about recklessness the better, so far as the general public is concerned.

The present state of the works is shown by fig. 3, and it is anticipated that the superstructure will be sufficiently complete to admit of the passage of a train across the Forth next October. It may be asked, Will the resultant shortening of the distance between North and South justify so much labour and cost? and the answer must be that, in the present day, time is pre-eminently the equivalent of money. A glance at any map will show that the Forth Bridge is the missing link in the great East Coast chain of communication, along which gallop the fastest trains in the world. Between London and Edinburgh the greater part of the journey is done at a speed exceeding 50 miles an hour; the 105 miles between Grantham and King's Cross averages. 54 miles for the whole journey, and some time ago the 4.18 P.M. train from Grantham was timed to run 24 miles in 22 minutes, one mile being done in 46 seconds, or at the rate of 74 miles an hour. Compare this with the anticipations of the last generation. In 1825 the Quarterly Review, in an appreciative article on the proposed Woolwich Railway, deprecated any wild estimates as to speed. We will back,' it said, 'old Father Thames against the Woolwich Railway for any sum. We trust that Parliament will in all railways it may sanction limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour, which is as great as can be ventured on with safety.' When the prophets have failed so egregiously in the past, it would be rash for any one to venture to predict that even larger and more costly works than the Forth Bridge will not be considered a necessity of the railway system of the future. There is, indeed, exhibited at the Paris Exhibition a set of plans for a bridge across the English Channel by no less distinguished firms than Messrs. Schneider of Creusot and M. Hirsent, contractor, having seventy cantilever spans similar to those at the Forth Bridge; and last year a charter was granted by the American Legislature for a bridge across the Hudson River of 2,800 feet span; so, in the opinion of our French and American brethren at least, finality is by no means attained in the Forth Bridge.

JOHN FOWLER.

B. BAKER.

THE FIRST-NIGHT JUDGMENT OF PLAYS.

A MINOR philosopher who recently crossed the Atlantic, tired of watching the everlasting stretch of waters, to relieve his weariness dropped a plummet into that other and vaster ocean-boundless, unfathomable, innavigable-the ocean of human credulity and fatuity. At the hour before dinner, when it is customary for passengers to take their constitutional on deck, he sauntered up to one of the airfunnels on the Etruria,' and putting his arm down it, he kept it there for some ninety seconds, and then withdrawing it with an expression of pain, he asked the guileless passers-by how it was that by putting one's arm down that particular funnel one received, after a minute or so, a severe electric shock at the elbow. With the help of a confederate, a genial master of hounds, who kindly acted as 'bonnet,' about a hundred passengers were induced to try the experiment. With this curious result. Some forty of them received slight electric shocks, some ten or a dozen received violent shocks, and four or five of them entered into elaborate scientific, but mutually destructive, explanations of an occurrence that had never taken place.

If of a hundred people taken from the class who occupy the saloon of a Cunard steamer, and who may be supposed to be considerably above the average in education, intelligence, scientific knowledge, and general balance of mental power-if of this hundred, fifty can, by the merest suggestion, be persuaded that they experience an acute bodily sensation, when, in fact, they experience nothing, how many of the ordinary mass of theatre-goers, taken haphazard from all ranks of society and intelligence, can be persuaded, or may persuade themselves, that a good play is a bad one, or that a bad play is a good one? If the average man cannot be trusted in a thing so simple and direct as knowing whether he feels an electric shock or not, how can he be trusted in a mental operation so subtle, so complex, so indefinite, so elusive of demonstration as the formation of an opinion on a work of art? And yet everybody who is present at a theatre on a first night immediately passes the glibbest and surest judgment on a new play.

The implied suggestion that a modern play may be considered as

a work of art will be received with a smile and a sneer. It will draw a smile from those who remember that the English drama is still supposed to be a branch of English literature, that any enduring renown it may win must be not merely theatrical but literary as well, that the one great flowering time of our national drama was the very midsummer of our national literature. It will raise a sneer and a shout of contempt from all the throng whose busy interest it is to spread the hateful maxim that the theatre is nothing but a shop to purvey any empty amusement that the public may clamour for, and that, therefore, any mention of art in connection with the stage must come from the lips of an impostor or a fanatic. And doubtless these two classes of objectors, from very opposite reasons, will resent the suggestion that the judgment pronounced upon a modern play has any farther-reaching consequence or influence than the varying amount of cash it may transfer from the pockets of the public to the pockets of the manager, or that it can be worth while to examine the methods whereby a play becomes popular any more than it can be worth while to enter into an exhaustive discussion of the methods whereby the Philistine is taught to purchase what is called high-art furniture in the Tottenham Court Road.

Indeed one is forced to take an apologetic tone when one speaks of our modern drama, and the time seems to be a long way off when it will be permitted for any one with a sense of proportion or a memory of the wise Arnoldian precept about seeing things as they are,' to boast of our having a living English drama at all commensurate with and responsive to the national life, and flashing back upon a theatreloving and theatre-going community the faithful image of themselves. In no sense can the Victorian drama be said to bear any such relation to the Victorian literature and the Victorian age as the Elizabethan drama bears to the Elizabethan literature and the Elizabethan age. We have a great Victorian literature, we have plenty of stagecraft, but when the great masters of our modern literature have written plays they have only shown that they do not know the stage. There is no reason in the nature of things why we should not again have a literary drama if we only set about it the right way. And in a confused and bewildered way we do seem to be struggling towards some sincere form of national drama, and there does seem to be springing up a growing discontent with the puerilities and transparent unrealities that have so long held sway on the English stage. But even the most earnest well-wishers to the theatre, those who are most anxious that it should cease to be the people's bauble, and become a real power in our intellectual and artistic life-even these do not quite seem to know what they want of it, or how they would have it set about its new career.

It is the object of this paper to examine the machinery in present use for the formation and direction of public opinion in the judgment