Let us contrast fairly the positions of the French and the English dramatist. The former has at his disposal all the material for drama available to the latter, except perhaps a limited particular branch of local humour, whilst the Englishman not only would be unwise to employ the foreign local humour, but is forbidden to use a very large number of subjects and ideas open to his competitor. In other words, the Englishman's stock may be regarded as _x_, and the Frenchman's as _x_ + _y_, for the local humour on one side may be set off against the local humour on the other. Now _y_, far from being unimportant, is the chief material employed by many of the Parisian playwrights. They and their audiences have grown tired of _x_, whilst our unhappy writers are almost bound to confine themselves to this far from unknown quantity. Thackeray is said to have regretted that he did not enjoy the freedom of a Fielding. Which of our playwrights does not envy the licence of a Capus? Think of our poor British dramatist compelled to write for a public that likes anecdotal plays, demands happy-ever-after endings and is easily shocked. Really his position is pitiful. The peculiar laws of the theatre require such brutal directness of method that although our novelists are able, by means of delicate treatment, to handle almost any subject, the playwright is condemned to something like a gin-horse revolution, round a little track of conventional morality. It is a rather curious fact that two different schools of French dramatists approach the forbidden half-world from opposite poles--but they get there. Emile Augier and Dumas _fils_ were sincere moralists according to their points of view, though the methods of their moralizing some times seem quaint to us. Both of them preached the importance of chastity and the beauty of conjugal love and parental and filial affection, and each admired fervently the idea of family--an idea deemed comparatively unimportant in our colonizing country. On the whole their ideals are ours, though sometimes there seems to us a queer twist in their expression of them. In order to support their ideas of social and family life and their view of the sanctity of true marriage they were forced to exhibit the perils caused by lawless passion, and frequently their works, as in such extreme instances as _Le Mariage d'Olympe_ and _La Femme de Claude_, which has the memorable preface with the _Tue la_ phrase, deal candidly with very ugly matters.