Everybody knows that Browning wrote a number of plays. _A Soul's Tragedy_ was lately presented by the Stage Society, an interesting hardly successful experiment. _A Blot on the 'Scutcheon_ was produced at Drury Lane in 1842 and revived by Phelps at Sadler's Wells, and also in 1893 by the Independent Theatre, when Miss May Harvey gave an admirable performance as Mildred; whilst _Strafford_, _Colombe's Birthday_ and _In a Balcony_ have all seen the footlights and achieved at the most a _succès d'estime_. Few, however, even putting aside the vulgar, fallacious test of the box-office, would say that these works are really valuable stage dramas, despite the superb qualities obvious in them. Some of Lord Byron's plays have been given upon the boards; but the real Byron of the stage is the author of _Our Boys_ and goodness knows how many more successful works, all as dead to-day as the dramas of Sheridan Knowles. It has been said that _The Cenci_, when produced privately by Sir Percy Bysshe Shelley, with Miss Alma Murray as heroine, acted very well. Has the Stage Society ever considered the question of a revival? How, then, did it happen that Balzac, Byron, Browning and Reade failed as dramatists, despite the eager desire of three of them, at least, to win success on the boards? It is undeniable that the three--one may put aside Byron--are intensely "dramatic" writers. _Les Chouans_ reads almost as if it were a play converted into a novel, and has been adapted successfully, and like _Le Père Goriot_, which someone has called the French _King Lear_, has been used for the stage after the time when the long-desired marriage with Madame Hanska was ended by the premature death of the author of the fine phrase, "_Vierges de corps nous étions hardis en paroles_." Indeed, in half the works composing the prodigious _Comédie Humaine_ are passages of immense dramatic force. Clearly, too, the author of "The Cloister and the Hearth" could paint character and was a splendid storyteller into the bargain. It would be impossible to say this without certain qualifications in the case of Browning; yet who that has been fascinated by that colossal work "The Ring and the Book" can deny it? Why, then, should Balzac and Browning have failed where Shakespeare and Sardou have succeeded?