If an American character was drawn at all, he was too apt to be a Solon Shingle or a Mose; if an American play was written at all, its scenes were laid on _Sandy Bars_, or in the false and unhealthful atmosphere of _Saratoga_ or _Long Branch_. While London managers presented _Orange Blossoms_ and _Two Roses_, the managers of New York and Boston set _Diamonds_ and _Pearls_. The English flowers were fresh and fragrant; the American jewels, although they had a certain sparkle, were too often paste. The exotics flourished and bloomed on our soil for a time, it is true; but if they had been native buds they would have withered in a week, or else, like so many other indigenous plants, have been left to waste their sweetness in the pigeon-holes of managers' desks. So strong was this unnatural prejudice against the production of an American picture of American home-life upon the American stage, that in one of the brightest American comedies ever taken from the French Mr. Hurlburt was forced to go abroad with his characters, and to place his _Americans in Paris_. All this is not so true of the stage of to-day as it was at the beginning of the second century of our national drama. Scores of native writers, during the past decade or two, have presented American plays which have been clean and clever, even if they have not yet become classic. But it is a striking fact that the first three original "society plays" which were in any way successful upon the American stage were from the pens of women--Mrs. Mowatt's _Fashion_, Mrs. Bateman's _Self_, and Miss Heron's _The Belle of the Season_--and that since their production the name of a woman has very rarely appeared upon the bills as the author of a play. During the ten years which followed the first performance of _Fashion_ it had a few rivals--comedies and dramas, satirical or otherwise--which treated, or pretended to treat, of that which asserts itself to be "the higher stratum of American society." Among the longer lived of these were _Extremes_, a local New York play, which ran for three weeks at the Broadway Theatre in 1850; a dramatization of Mr. Curtis's _Potiphar Papers_, brought out at Burton's Theatre in 1854, in which Charles Fisher made a great hit as Creamcheese; and Mr. De Walden's _Upper Ten and Lower Twenty_, also at Burton's, in 1854, in which Mr. Burton himself, as Christopher Crookpath, a serious part, was a genuine surprise to his audience, and created a profound impression. _Extremes_, by a Baltimore gentleman, was never repeated here; the version of Mr. Curtis's work--happily called _Our Best Society_--was merely an adaptation; Mr. De Walden was not a native writer; and only one of these productions, and that one the least successful, was an original American play. [Illustration: BRANDER MATTHEWS.]