THE LIFE-CYCLE of the drama critic resembles that of a not-so-absolute monarch. At the beginning of his reign, he feels called upon to be strict and even savage in the establishment of his authority; towards the end, a mellowness sets in, and he countenances much that would, years ago, have brought instant retribution from his verbal cat-o'-nine-tails.

Four years ago, my model as a reviewer was George Bernard Shaw and I longed to write as he once did in reviewing a production of Henry IV:

Mr. Mollison presented us with an assortment of effects, and tones, and poses which had no reference, as far as I could discover, to the part of Bolingbroke at any single point. I did not catch a glimpse of the character from one end of his performance to the other...Mr. Gillmore followed every sentence with a forced explosion of mirthless laughter, evidently believing that as Prince Hal was reputed to be a humorous character it was his business to laugh at him...Mr. Tree wants only one thing to make him an excellent Falstaff, and that is to get born over again as unlike himself as possible. No doubt in the course of a month or two, when he begins to pick up a few of the lines of the part, he will improve on his first effort; but he will never be an even moderately good Falstaff...All this is hopeless, irremediable.

Iolanthe is as good as this Henry IV was bad, and a reviewer need not be in his dotage to rave about it. Increasingly, Iolanthe seems to be the favorite work of most Gilbert & Sullivan fanciers. Those who like the gentle, submarine beauty of Sullivan's music claim the best of that is here; others who prefer his loud, brass musical parodies consider the finest of them to be songs like "Bow, bow ye lower middle classes" and "When all night long a chap remains." Those who love the way Gilbert's characters take an inherently silly contradiction and straight-facedly draw it out to a logical conclusion consider the Lord Chancellor the apex of this species. And, finally, those who relish most of all Gilbert's pointed but unhysterical satire find it at its most effective in Iolanthe:

When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte,

As every child can tell,

The House of Peers, throughout the war,

Did nothing in particular,

And did it very well:

Yet Britain set the world ablaze

In good King George's glorious days!

and:

When in that house MP's divide,

If they've a brain and cerebellum, too

They've got to leave that brain outside