Holcroft,[258] and G. Colman the younger,[259] all writers of popular comedies, as well as the prolific J. O'Keefe (1746-1833), who contributed to nearly every species of the comic drama, survived into the 19th century. To an earlier date belong the favourite burlesques of O'Keefe's countryman K. O'Hara[260] (d. 1782), good examples of a species the further history of which may be left aside. In the hands of at least one later writer, J. R. Planché, it proved capable of satisfying a more refined taste than his successors have habitually consulted. The English drama of the 19th century. The decline of dramatic composition of the higher class, perceptible in the history of the English theatre about the beginning of the 19th century, was justly attributed by Sir Walter Scott to the wearing out of the French model that had been so long wrought upon; but when he asserted that the new impulse which was sought in the dramatic literature of Germany was derived from some of its worst, instead of from its noblest, productions--from Kotzebue rather than from Lessing, Schiller and Goethe--he showed a very imperfect acquaintance with a complicated literary movement which was obliquely reflected in the stage-plays of Iffland and his contemporaries. The change which was coming over English literature was in truth of a wider and deeper nature than it was possible for even one of its chief representatives to perceive. As that literature freed itself from the fetters so long worn by it as indispensable ornaments, and threw aside the veil which had so long obscured both the full glory of its past and the lofty capabilities of its future, it could not resort except tentatively to a form which like the dramatic is bound by a hundred bonds to the life of the age itself. Soon, the poems with which Scott and Byron, and the unrivalled prose fictions with which Scott, both satisfied and stimulated the imaginative demands of the public, diverted the attention of the cultivated classes from dramatic literature, which was unable to escape, with the light foot of verse or prose fiction, into "the new, the romantic land." New themes, new ideas, new forms occupied a new generation of writers and readers; nor did the drama readily lend itself as a vessel into which to pour so many fermenting elements. In Byron the impressions produced upon a mind not less open to impulses from without than subjective in its way of recasting them, called forth a series of dramatic attempts betraying a more or less wilful ignorance of the demands of dramatic compositions; his beautiful _Manfred_, partly suggested by Goethe's _Faust_, and his powerful _Cain_, have but the form of plays; his tragedies on Italian historical subjects show some resemblance in their political rhetoric to the contemporary works of Alfieri; his _Sardanapalus_, autobiographically interesting, fails to meet the demands of the stage; his _Werner_ (of which the authorship has