These exceptional men--too few, too scattered, too personally unimportant in the republic of letters, to have any strong or lasting influence--are not the professed dramatists of our times. These are not the writers who make so much as a clerk's income out of the stage. The few men of practical ability who now write for the English Theatre, are men of the world, who know that they are throwing away their talents if they take the trouble to invent, for an average remuneration of one hundred and fifty pounds. The well-paid Frenchman supplies them with a story and characters ready made. The Original Adaptation is rattled off in a week: and the dramatic author beats the clerk after all, by getting so much more money for so much less manual exercise in the shape of writing. Below this clever tactician, who foils the theatre with its own weapons, come the rank-and-file of hack-writers, who work still more cheaply, and give still less (I am rejoiced to say) for the money. The stage results of this sort of authorship, as you have already implied, virtually drive the intelligent classes out of the theatre. Half a century since, the prosperity of the manager's treasury would have suffered in consequence. But the increase of wealth and population, and the railway connection between London and the country, more than supply in quantity what audiences have lost in quality. Not only does the manager lose nothing in the way of profit--he absolutely gains by getting a vast nightly majority into his theatre, whose ignorant insensibility nothing can shock. Let him cast what garbage he pleases before them, the unquestioning mouths of his audience open, and snap at it. I am sorry and ashamed to write in this way of any assemblage of my own countrymen; but a large experience of theatres forces me to confess that I am writing the truth. If you want to find out who the people are who know nothing whatever, even by hearsay, of the progress of the literature of their own time--who have caught no chance vestige of any one of the ideas which are floating about before their very eyes--who are, to all social intents and purposes, as far behind the age they live in, as any people out of a lunatic asylum can be--go to a theatre, and be very careful, in doing so, to pick out the most popular performance of the day. The actors themselves, when they are men of any intelligence, are thoroughly aware of the utter incapacity of the tribunal which is supposed to judge them. Not very long ago, an actor, standing deservedly in the front rank of his profession, happened to play even more admirably than usual in a certain new part. Meeting him soon afterwards, I offered him my mite of praise in all sincerity. "Yes," was his reply. "I know that I act my very best in that part, for I hardly get a hand of applause in it through the whole evening." Such is the condition to which the dearth of good literature has now reduced the audiences of English