It remains to say a few words of the English literary drama, as opposed to the acted drama. The two classes are not nearly so distinct as they once were; but plays continue to be produced from time to time which are wholly unfitted for the theatre, and others which, though they may be experimentally placed on the stage, make their appeal rather to the reading public. Tennyson had essayed in his old age an art which is scarcely to be mastered after the energy of youth has passed. He continued to the last to occupy himself more or less with drama, and all his plays, except _Harold_, found their way to the stage. _The Cup_ and _Becket_, as we have seen, met with a certain success, but _The Promise of May_ (1882), an essay in contemporary drama, was a disastrous failure, while _The Falcon_ (1879) and _The Foresters_ (acted by an American company in 1893) made little impression. Lord Tennyson was certainly not lacking in dramatic faculty, but he worked in an outworn form which he had no longer the strength to renovate. Swinburne continued now and then to cast his creations in the dramatic mould, but it cannot be said that his dramas attained either the vitality or the popularity of his lyrical poems. _Mary Stuart_ (1881) brought his Marian trilogy to a close. In _Locrine_ he produced a tragedy in heroic couplets--a thing probably unattempted since the age of Dryden. _The Sisters_ is a tragedy of modern date with a medieval drama inserted by way of interlude. _Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards_ (1899), perhaps approached more nearly than any of his former works to the concentration essential to drama. It may be doubted, however, whether his copious and ebullient style could ever really subject itself to the trammels of dramatic form. Of other dramas on the Elizabethan model, the most notable, perhaps, were the works of two ladies who adopt the pseudonym of "Michael Field"; _Callirrhoë_ (1884), _Brutus Ultor_ (1887), and many other dramas, show considerable power of imagination and expression, but are burdened by a deliberate artificiality both of technique and style. Alfred Austin put forth several volumes in dramatic form, such as _Savonarola_ (1881), _Prince Lucifer_ (1887), _England's Darling_ (1896), _Flodden Field_ (1905). They are laudable in intention and fluent in utterance. Notable additions to the purely literary drama were made by Robert Bridges in his _Prometheus_ (1883), _Nero_ (1885), _The Feast of Bacchus_ (1889), and other solid plays in verse, full of science and skill, but less charming than his lyrical poems. Sir Lewis Morris made a dramatic experiment in _Gycia_, but was not encouraged to repeat it.