With the production of “School” the Bancroft management and the Robertson comedies reached high-water mark, and all the town was soon rushing to the Royal Dustbin in its grimy and shabby little street off the Tottenham Court Road. A return to the natural in comedy has always spelled success. Farquhar’s was such a return. Goldsmith’s return to nature was hailed by a community sick of stilted heroics and artificial sentiment. Sheridan later on recalled the playgoer to the fact that to give a humorous presentation of society as it is means the highest pleasure to the patron and the highest profit to the playwright. At this present time of writing a return to nature has a meaning very different indeed to that which it bore at other periods. Nowadays the meaning of a return to nature seems to be a return to obscenity. Natural is a term connoting lubricity. And to this confusion in the minds of some modern dramatists as to the true significance of words I attribute much of the irritation caused by supervision and most of the agitation fomented with a view of disestablishing the censorship. But in the old Tottenham Street days we had not as yet accepted the quaint perversion of ideas at present offered us by an anæmic, exotic, futile section of playwrights, whose goods are exhibited at unlicensed matinées, because—luckily—the managers see “no money” in them. The word “nature” was not understood in this foul fashion by T. W. Robertson. The men and women of Robertson’s comedies were the men and women of his own day. The incidents were amusing without being preposterous, or pathetic without being maudlin. The construction of the Robertson series was close, intelligible, sequent. His dialogue rippled rather than sparkled; the story was invariably simple, wholesome, attractive; and over each production was the incommunicable Robertson atmosphere.