And the management that presented these dainty works exercised a care, a taste, and a scrupulous devotion to the details of representation which came as a revelation to those acquainted with the stage methods of the period; and marked, indeed, a revolution in stage management. It is not overstating the case to say that, had it not been for the lead given in this direction by the Bancrofts in the ’sixties and early ’seventies, and subsequently followed up with still greater _éclat_ by the same artists at the Haymarket, one would scarcely have witnessed the elaborate sets and costly casts to which Irving accustomed us in the ’eighties and ’nineties, or on which, in our own time, Sir Herbert Tree spends so much money and so much intelligent enterprise. In the history of stage reform, however, the Bancrofts must always figure as pioneers; nor is anyone who is old enough to remember the London stage as it was accepted before their management of the Prince of Wales Theatre, at all likely to controvert the statement. Happily for the public, the lead was quickly and largely followed. The old-fashioned stage-manager became a thing of the past. What was once the exception is now the rule. “Most can raise the flowers now, For all have got the seed.” Slender as was my experience of London theatres and immature as was my judgment, I was intelligently impressed by the idyllic delicacy of the work represented, and by the exquisite rendering accorded by a company so wonderfully fitted with their parts. I confess to having felt an enthusiasm then which now I should have some difficulty in explaining. That emotion was soon to find an opportunity for expression. When “School” had been running for some little time, a letter appeared in the _Times_, conceived in that spirit of dignified rebuke which, in its correspondents, seems to have appealed to successive editors of that great newspaper. In this communication Robertson was crudely accused of having stolen the play, lock, stock, and barrel, from a play then (or recently) running in Germany. I had no acquaintance with the German language and no time (so insistent on protest was my indignation) to inquire into the facts. But I felt that from the internal evidence afforded by “School” I would be able to make a good case. Even in those remote days many of our most admired articles of so-called British manufacture were “made in Germany,” and most of them bore about with them the ineffaceable signs of their origin. I strongly felt that on internal evidence I should have little difficulty, in that “School” was “quite English, you know,” and that, above all, there was no trace whatever of anything German in the conception or the treatment. I had already seen the play a second time when the _Times_ letter made its appearance. On the night of the day on which it was published I paid a third visit to the pit of the Tottenham Street playhouse.