Let me make the meanness of the remuneration for stage-writing in our day, as compared with what that remuneration was in past times, clear to your mind by one or two examples. Rather more than a hundred years ago, Doctor Johnson wrote a very bad play called Irene, which proved a total failure on representation, and which tottered, rather than "ran," for just nine nights, to wretched houses. Excluding his literary copyright of a hundred pounds, the Doctor's dramatic profit on a play that was a failure--remember that!--amounted to one hundred and ninety-five pounds, being just forty-five pounds _more_ than the remuneration now paid, to my certain knowledge, for many a play within the last five years, which has had a successful run of sixty, and, in some cases, even of a hundred nights! I can imagine your amazement at reading this--but I can also assure you that any higher rate of remuneration is exceptional. Let me, however, give the managers the benefit of the exception. Sometimes two hundred pounds have been paid, within the last five years, for a play; and, on one or two rare occasions, three hundred. If Shakspere came to life again, and took Macbeth to an English theatre, in this year, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, that is the highest market remuneration he could get for it. You are to understand that this miserable decline in the money-reward held out to dramatic literature is peculiar to our own day. Without going back again so long as a century--without going back farther than the time of George Colman, the younger--I may remind you that the Comedy of John Bull brought the author twelve hundred pounds. Since then, six or seven hundred pounds have been paid for a new play; and, later yet, five hundred pounds. We have now dropped to three hundred pounds, as the exception, and to one hundred and fifty, as the rule. I am speaking, remember, of plays in not less than three acts, which are, or are supposed to be, original--of plays which run from sixty to a hundred nights, and which put their bread (buttered thickly on both sides) into the mouths of actors and managers. As to the remuneration for ordinary translations from the French, I would rather not mention what that is. And, indeed, there is no need I should do so. We are talking of the stage in its present relation to English literature. Suppose I wrote for it, as some of my friends suggest I should; and suppose I could produce one thoroughly original play, with a story of my own sole invention, with characters of my own sole creation, every year. The utmost annual income the English stage would, at present prices, pay me, after exhausting my brains in its service, would be three hundred pounds!