MY DEAR SIR,--I am sufficiently well-educated, and sufficiently refined in my tastes and habits, to be a member of the large class of persons usually honoured by literary courtesy with the title of the Intelligent Public. In the interests of the order to which I belong, I have a little complaint to make against the managers of our theatres, and a question to put afterwards, which you, as a literary man, will, I have no doubt, be both able and willing to answer. Like many thousands of other people, I am fond of reading and fond of going to the theatre. In regard to my reading, I have no complaint to make--for the press supplies me abundantly with English poems, histories, biographies, novels, essays, travels, criticisms, all of modern production. But, in regard to going to the theatre, I write with something like a sense of injury--for nobody supplies me with a good play. There is living literature of a genuine sort in the English libraries of the present time. Why (I beg to inquire) is there no living literature of a genuine sort in the English theatre of the present time, also? Say, I am a Frenchman, fond of the imaginative literature of my country, well-read in all the best specimens of it,--I mean, best in a literary point of view, for I am not touching moral questions now. When I shut up Balzac, Victor Hugo, Dumas, and Soulié, and go to the theatre--what do I find? Balzac, Victor Hugo, Dumas, and Soulié again. The men who have been interesting me in my arm-chair, interesting me once more in my stall. The men who can really invent and observe for the reader, inventing and observing for the spectator also. What is the necessary consequence? The literary standard of the stage is raised; and the dramatist by profession must be as clever a man, in his way, as good an inventor, as correct a writer, as the novelist. And what, in my case, follows that consequence? Clearly this: the managers of theatres get my money at night, as the publishers of books get it in the day. Do the managers get my money from me in England? By no manner of means. For they hardly ever condescend to address me.