designation of "musical comedy" or "musical farce." It first took form in a piece called _In Town_, by Messrs "Adrian Ross" and Osmond Carr (Prince of Wales's theatre, 1892), and rapidly became very popular. In these plays the scene and costumes are almost always modern though sometimes exotic, and the prose dialogue, setting forth an attenuated and entirely negligible plot, is frequently interrupted by musical numbers. The lyrics are often very clever pieces of rhyming, totally different from the inane doggrel of the old opera-bouffes and burlesques. In other respects there is little to be said for the literary or intellectual quality of "musical farce"; but, being an entirely English (or Anglo-American) product, it falls into line with the other indications we have noted of the general decline--one might almost say extinction--of French influence on the English stage. To what causes are we to trace this gradual disuse of adaptation? In the domain of modern comedy and drama, to two causes acting simultaneously: the decline in France of the method of Scribe, which produced "well-made," exportable plays, more or less suited to any climate and environment; and the rise in England of a generation of playwrights more original, thoughtful and able than their predecessors. It is not at all to be taken for granted that the falling off in the supply of exportable plays meant a decline in the absolute merit of French drama. The historian of the future may very possibly regard the movement in France, no less than the movement in England, as a step in advance, and may even see in the two movements co-ordinate manifestations of one tendency. Be this as it may, the fact is certain that as the playwrights of the Second Empire gradually died off, and were succeeded by the authors of the "new comedy," plays which would bear transplantation became ever fewer and farther between. Of recent years Henri Bernstein, author of _Le Voleur_ and _Samson_, has been almost the only French dramatist whose works have found a ready and steady market in England. Attempts to acclimatize French poetical drama--_Pour la Couronne_, _Le Chemineau_, _Cyrano de Bergerac_--were all more or less unsuccessful.