Marion Harland, in her _Recollections of a Christian Actress_, printed a few years ago, has paid the highest tribute to the personal worth of Mrs. Mowatt. What she accomplished during her professional life has, in a manner, been shown here. She was a representative American woman of whom American women have every reason to be proud; and as the writer of the first absolutely American society play, she must be forgiven the harm her brilliant and easy success as an actress has, by its example, since done to the American stage. Very few of our earlier native dramatists followed the fashion set by Mrs. Mowatt in writing original plays of American social life. "Plays of contemporaneous society," as they were called, were popular and fairly successful here; but they were the charming home comedies of men like Byron or Robertson, thoroughly English in character and tone, or they were taken from the French and the German, with purely foreign incidents and scenes. Some of these were "localized," and thus became cruel libels upon American men and manners, except upon such Americans as are influenced by the worship of _The Mighty Dollar_, or such as are to be found only in _Our Boarding-houses_, and _Under the Gas-light_. The New York play-goer of thirty years since looked in vain upon the stage for the domestic stories of American city and country life which he found in the then new novels of Theodore Winthrop, or in the then familiar poems of Dr. Holland. Until Joshua Whitcomb appeared we saw no American Peter Probity in an American _Chimney Corner_; and until Bronson Howard and David Lloyd and Brander Matthews and Edgar Fawcett began to write American plays we saw no American Haversack in an American _Old Guard_--not even an American Peter Teazle or an American John Mildmay; while we could not help feeling that _Still Waters Run as Deep_ in this country as they run in the old, and that the _School for Scandal_ in real life has as many graduates and undergraduates in the United States as it has anywhere else. [Illustration: EDGAR FAWCETT.]