We have been forced already to confess that single-character pieces are the only style of drama to which full justice can be done in any theatre in London. Many people, deluded by this circumstance, and preferring the perfection of one to the mediocrity of many, will gravely tell you that the drama itself ought to be formed, in this respect, on the model of the stage; that the interest ought to be concentred in the hero, and the others kept entirely subordinate, or at least only endowed with vitality enough to enable them to survive the kicks and buffets with which the chief personage of the plot asserts his superiority. That one central interest must exist in a properly-constructed drama, there is no doubt; but it is a terrible narrowing of the author’s walk if you debar him from affixing this interest to a group, and limit it entirely to one. You force him to descend to mere peculiarities, and the evolvement of character in its most contracted sense—thereby, and to this extent, trenching upon the province of farce, which consists in a development of the humours of some selected individual. The drama, on the other hand, paints humanity in the abstract, modified in its particular action by the position and character of the personages of the story; and in so far as, for the sake of one chief actor, the movement of the play is made to depend on him, the poet sinks from being the Titian or Michael Angelo of his art, into the Watson Gordon, Phillips, or Pickersgill;—high names certainly; but portrait-painting, even at its best, is not history. Let any man read _Julius Cæsar_, and think of the Kembles, Young, Macready, and Elliston all in the same play, and talk no more of a one-charactered drama as the fittest for representation, and the highest of its class. A one-charactered drama is only the best when there is but one good actor in a theatre; if there were three good actors, a three-charactered play would speedily arise; where all were good, Shakspeare would reappear—that is to say, crowds would go to see Shakspeare, instead of going, as now, to see this or that performer in Hamlet or Macbeth.