"When I belonged to the Drury Lane Committee, and was one of the Sub-Committee of Management, the number of _plays_ upon the shelves were about _five_ hundred. Conceiving that amongst these there must be _some_ of merit, in person and by proxy I caused an investigation. I do not think that of those which I saw there was one which could be conscientiously tolerated. There never were such things as most of them! Mathurin was very kindly recommended to me by Walter Scott, to whom I had recourse, firstly, in the hope that he would do something for us himself; and, secondly, in my despair, that he would point out to us any young (or old) writer of promise. Mathurin sent his Bertram and a letter _without_ his address, so that at first I could give him no answer. When I at last hit upon his residence, I sent him a favourable answer and something more substantial. His play succeeded; but I was at that time absent from England. "I tried Coleridge too; but he had nothing feasible in hand at the time. Mr. Sotheby obligingly offered _all_ his tragedies, and I pledged myself, and notwithstanding many squabbles with my Committed Brethren, did get 'Ivan' accepted, read, and the parts distributed. But, lo! in the very heart of the matter, upon some _tepid_ness on the part of Kean, or warmth on that of the author, Sotheby withdrew his play. Sir J.B. Burgess did also present four tragedies and a farce, and I moved green-room and Sub-Committee, but they would not. "Then the scenes I had to go through!--the authors, and the authoresses, and the milliners, and the wild Irishmen,--the people from Brighton, from Blackwall; from Chatham, from Cheltenham, from Dublin, from Dundee,--who came in upon me! to all of whom it was proper to give a civil answer, and a hearing, and a reading. Mrs. * * * *'s father, an Irish dancing-master of sixty years, calling upon me to request to play Archer, dressed in silk stockings on a frosty morning to show his legs (which were certainly good and Irish for his age, and had been still better,)--Miss Emma Somebody, with a play entitled 'The Bandit of Bohemia,' or some such title or production,--Mr. O'Higgins, then resident at Richmond, with an Irish tragedy, in which the unities could not fail to be observed, for the protagonist was chained by the leg to a pillar during the chief part of the performance. He was a wild man, of a salvage appearance, and the difficulty of _not_ laughing at him was only to be got over by reflecting upon the probable consequences of such cachinnation. "As I am really a civil and polite person, and _do_ hate giving pain when it can be avoided, I sent them up to Douglas Kinnaird,--who is a man of business, and sufficiently ready with a negative,--and left them to settle with him; and as the beginning of next year I went abroad, I have since been little aware of the progress of the theatres.