The literary gift is too often a faculty which exists by itself, and is not conjoined with versatility. Weary though he may be, the author has no alternative, and must drag along in his profession, feeling that he were better out of it, and yet that he is useless for anything else. His future is held in the Acherontic depths of his ink-pot, and all he is capable of winning is in solution there. He thinks of the theatre in his despair, and may find comfort in the reflection that one substantially-successful play brings its author more money than a poet or historian receives for all the masterpieces of his life. Harry Esmond mentions with pride somewhere in his history that a play of his writing had the honor of being represented two or three times; and in the colonel's day dramatic literature was scarcely more profitable than other kinds of writing. Now, however, a new play, produced at a metropolitan theatre with the elaborate mounting and excellent acting that are customary, is considered a positive failure if it is withdrawn at the end of a month, and it is not unusual to see two or three pieces filling the whole season. The metropolitan successes are also wanted by managers in other cities; and from one manuscript, about one-third the length of an ordinary novelette, the author may derive twenty thousand dollars or more in two or three years. The play holds out the one possibility of a fortune which literature without transcendent genius offers, and though the chances of winning are known to be few, the prize is so splendid that it is tried for by men of every intellectual calibre. The poet, the essayist, the novelist, the newspaper editor, the newspaper critic and the newspaper reporter, the scholar and the airy _raconteur_, have all written something for the theatre, and visions of the auditorium filled with a well-dressed, perfumed, smiling throng, of the lights, the applause and the excitement, have given speed to their pens. Beyond its profitableness the drama has another and powerful fascination for its author. Presupposing that it is competently acted and mounted with the exquisite taste and completeness of detail that we see at such theatres as the Union Square in New York, the manuscript is touched as by a magician's wand and from a collocation of words becomes a living, visible world, and a beatific, almost deifying, consciousness of creation fills the author as he contemplates the embodied offspring of his brain.