M. Emile Augier’s _Gendre de M. Poirier_ started the son-in-law as a dramatic subject. In this comedy, one of the best of modern times, a rich bourgeois has married his daughter to a penniless aristocrat, who directs the household in such a sumptuous style that the father-in-law finds himself in a fair way of being ruined. To this a sort of counterpart was furnished by M. Augier himself in _Un Beau Mariage_; which, while sparing fathers-in-law, exposes the thoughtlessness of some mothers-in-law who expect their daughters’ husbands, not only to take charge of their affairs, but to accompany them to evening parties and balls. This to a serious-minded young man would doubtless be a great trial; and in M. Augier’s comedy the end of the matter is that the husband leaves the house of his rich mother-in-law, and, followed at a very dramatic crisis by his wife, supports himself by the exercise of his talents as a chemist, mechanician, and inventor. The mother-in-law, even when she possesses the advantage of being rich, is not a popular character on the French stage; nor, apparently, on the Spanish stage either. There is, at all events, a modern Spanish comedy, called _The Meadow Coat_ (the rough coat, that is to say, of the untrained, unclipped horse), in which, as in _Un Beau Mariage_, a rustic husband who rises early meets, on coming down in the morning, his wife and mother returning from a late ball. In M. Augier’s corresponding scene the husband has been reading and writing all night when the two ladies in their ball dresses suddenly burst upon his solitude. _Le Gendre de M. Poirier_, too, was the progenitor, or at least the caller-into-existence, of another son-in-law piece called _Les Petites Mains_, in which a son-in-law of fashionable tastes and habits, but without money of his own, is harshly treated by a father-in-law, who insists upon his adopting some occupation, and who ultimately, by dint of persecution and misrepresentation, separates him from his wife and forces him to become clerk and touter to a house agent. The moral of this amusing little comedy is not quite apparent to the unspectacled eye. The semi-burlesque proposition on which it rests is, however, to the effect that men with large hands are intended by nature to make money, and men with small hands to spend it. The piece belongs in any case to the son-in-law series, in which, by its entertaining qualities, it may claim to hold an honorable place.