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The romance between Wellington's aide and Julie Rothschild is fictitious. Not so the picture's explanation of the Rothschilds' famed system of secret communications. The Rothschilds did get news before anyone else; they got it, so far as anyone knows, not only by pigeon-post but from a fleet of channel boats which Nathan Rothschild ran partly for smuggling and partly as a private news link with France. A paunchy, mysterious combination of Jesse Livermore and the elder Morgan, he appeared on the London stock exchange not on the day of Waterloo but on the day after the battle. The legend went about that he had seen the battle himself; the long face he wore made traders think that Wellington had been defeated. In the panic Rothschild profited, as the picture shows, by purchasing sound securities cheap but his activities as a patriotic moneychanger got him no British knighthood. Contemporary Rothschilds might not like the fact that The House of Rothschild makes their ancestor more of a national hero than a level-headed banker but they would be less likely than old Nathan himself to resent the portrait which the picture furnishes of him. Nathan was rude, uneasy, eccentric. He made patrician callers asking for loans wait for hours in his anterooms. One of his confreres on the London exchange said: "There is a rigidity . . . which would make you fancy, if you did not see that it was not so, that someone was pinching him behind, and that he was either ashamed or afraid to say so. . . ." George Arliss makes Nathan Rothschild a colorful, curious and dramatic character and. like all Arliss heroes, a gentleman. False is the notion that the career of George Arliss is based upon a trick of impersonating celebrated historical characters whom he chances to resemble. He was born in Bloomsbury, London, in 1868. He and his small cronies, the Soutar brothers, Henry and Joseph, who became well-known British actors, used to give plays in a basement. Says George Arliss in his autobiography: "We could seat eight comfortably but seldom succeeded in getting a full house. Often we had only one but we made an effort to get at least two because we found it easier to work on the emotions of a crowd than on a single individual." Arliss found his father's publishing business tedious, persuaded an actor friend to let him be an "extra gentleman" with the Elephant and Castle Stock Company in London. At 23, Arliss was playing Old Comedies (The Rivals, The Road to Ruin, She Stoops to Conquer) at Margate. In the company was a pretty girl named Florence Montgomery. One afternoon they both ran into the empty theatre to get out of a shower. Arliss's description of what happened: "It may not be easy to bring about these conditions—the combination of rain and an empty theatre. ... If it can be done, results come quickly. I should imagine that in my case, the whole thing didn't take more than four minutes but there she was, at the end of that time, mine forever." In 1901 Arliss arrived in the U. S. with Mrs. Patrick Campbell for a season's tour. He stayed for 20 years. In 1908 he had his first starring part, in The Devil by young Ferenc Molnar. Two years later Producer George Tyler persuaded Louis Parker. English dramatist and composer, to write a play about Disraeli. Arliss played it for five years—two in Manhattan, two in large U. S. cities, one in