The poet, the essayist and the others have written their plays, inspired and accelerated by dreams of a sweeter success than they have known before, and if the reader should ask what has become of them we might answer by begging him to consult the theatrical records and find out how many new plays by American authors have been produced during the past ten years. The end, if not the history, of nearly all of them is the same. They have been received by the managers with a degree of attention measured and varied according to the positions and influences of the persons submitting them. Some of the authors have written to theatres praying for a hearing, and have waited in vain for an answer; others have succeeded in getting their manuscripts into some manager's hands, and have been promised a decision which has been put off from month to month, until at the end of a year or so they have been glad to recover their work, though it has not been read; a few have had their plays accepted, and are only sanguine at the beginning of each season to become disheartened before its close as this or that success of London or Paris has occupied the theatre and deferred the production of their own work, which is effectually entombed in an office-safe: these live on wearily, ever in sight of a desired object to which they never come nearer; and, finally, there are a limited number who, impatient of the delays or rejected at houses where alone production would be worth while, have withdrawn their plays and given them to secondary managers or "stars"--a course fatal to both pecuniary and artistic success.