I once asked Maddison Morton some particulars concerning his subsequent career as a dramatist, when he observed, quaintly enough, "My dear boy, it would never do for me to blow my own trumpet. In the first place, I haven't got one, and I am sure I could not blow it if I had." It is sometimes brought as a charge against Maddison Morton that his plays are taken from the French, and as such are devoid of original merit. But how little such as these understand Maddison Morton or his incomparable style. He may have borrowed his plots from France, but what trace of French writing is to be found in the immortal "Box and Cox," or "Woodcock's Little Game?" "Box and Cox" is taken from two French farces, one called "Frisette," and the other "Une Chambre à Deux Lits," but the writing of the farce as much belongs to the man, and is as distinctly original and personal to him as anything ever said or written by Henry James Byron. For my own poor part, I consider that Maddison Morton is funnier than any writer for the stage in his day. It is the kind of dry, sententious humor that tickles one far more than the extravagances, the puns, and the strained tomfooleries of the modern writer of burlesque--the very burlesque that Maddison Morton considers was the death-blow to the old-fashioned English farce. Players may yet find it profitable to revive the taste for short farces, and they need not hesitate to do so because several excellent and funny plays by the author of "Box and Cox" remain unused. Benjamin Webster told Maddison Morton, not long before his death, that he had made more money by farces than by any other description of drama. This is not difficult to account for. The author was certainly not overpaid; the farces were evidently well acted; it cost next to nothing to produce them, and if successful, the world and his wife went to see them. Writing to a friend the other day, Maddison Morton observes: "The introduction of 'Burlesque' gave the first 'knock-down blow' to the old-fashioned farce. I hoped against hope that its popularity would return, and that some employment might still be found for my pen. I was disappointed; and as the only means of discharging liabilities which I had in the mean time unavoidably contracted, I was compelled to part with my copyrights, the accumulation of a life's laborious and not unsuccessful work."