From the outset of his career, John Davidson (1857-1909) was haunted by the conviction that he was a born dramatist; but his earlier plays, such as _Smith: a Tragedy_ (1886), _Bruce: a Chronicle Play_ (1884) and _Scaramouch in Naxos_ (1888), contained more poetry than drama; and his later pieces, such as _Self's the Man_ (1901), _The Theatrocrat_ (1905) and the _Triumph of Mammon_ (1907), showed a species of turbulent imagination, but became more and more fantastic and impracticable. Stephen Phillips (b. 1867), on the other hand, having had some experience as an actor, wrote always with the stage in view. In his first play, _Paolo and Francesca_ (1899; produced in 1902), he succeeded in combining great beauty of diction with intense dramatic power and vitality. The same may be said of _Herod_ (1900); but in _Ulysses_ (1902) and _Nero_ (1906) a great falling-off in constructive power was only partially redeemed by the fine inspiration of individual passages. The collaboration of Robert Louis Stevenson with William Ernest Henley produced a short series of interesting experiments in drama, two of which, _Beau Austin_ (1883) and _Admiral Guinea_ (1884), had more than a merely experimental value. The former was an emotional comedy, treating with rare distinction of touch a difficult, almost an impossible, subject; the latter was a nautical melodrama, raised by force of imagination and diction into the region of literature. Incomparably the most important of recent additions to the literary drama is Thomas Hardy's vast panorama of the Napoleonic wars, entitled _The Dynasts_ (1904-1908). It is rather an epic in dialogue than a play; but however we may classify it we cannot but recognize its extraordinary intellectual and imaginative powers.