Besides these plays for music, and besides the more important five-act comedies to be considered later, MM. Meilhac and Halevy are the authors of thirty or forty comic dramas--as they are called on the English stage--or farce-comedies in one, two, three, four, and even five acts, ranging in aim from the gentle satire of sentimentality in _La Veuve_ to the outspoken farce of the _Reveillon_. Among the best of the longer of these comic plays are _Tricoche et Cacolet_ and _La Boule_. Both were written for the Palais Royal, and they are models of the new dramatic species which came into existence at that theatre about twenty years ago, as M. Francisquc Sarcey recently reminded us in his interesting article on the Palais Royal in _The Nineteenth Century_. This new style of comic play may be termed realistic farce--realistic, because it starts from every-day life and the most matter-of-fact conditions; and farce, because it uses its exact facts only to further its fantasy and extravagance. Consider _La Boule_. Its first act is a model of accurate observation; it is a transcript from life; it is an inside view of a commonplace French household which incompatibility of temper has made unsupportable. And then take the following acts, and see how on this foundation of fact, and screened by an outward semblance of realism, there is erected the most laughable superstructure of fantastic farce. I remember hearing one of the two great comedians of the Theatre Francais, M. Coquelin, praise a comic actor of the Varietes whom we had lately seen in a rather cheap and flimsy farce, because he combined "la verite la plus absolue avec la fantasie la plus pure." And this is the merit of _La Boule_: its most humorous inventions have their roots in the truth. Better even than _La Boule_ is _Tricoche et Cacolet_, which is the name of a firm of private detectives whose exploits and devices surpass those imagined by Poe in America, by Wilkie Collins in England, and by Gaboriau in France. The manifold disguises and impersonations of the two partners when seeking to outwit each other are as well-motived and as fertile in comic effect as any of the attempts of Crispin or of some other of Regnard's interchangeable valets. Is not even the _Legataire Universel_, Regnard's masterpiece, overrated? To me it is neither higher comedy nor more provocative of laughter than either _La Boule_ or _Tricoche et Cacolet_; and the modern plays, as I have said, are based on a study of life as it is, while the figures of the older comedies are frankly conventional. Nowhere in Regnard is there a situation equal in comic power to that in the final act of the _Reveillon_--a situation Moliere would have been glad to treat.