The first phenomenon to impress him must be the fact that in a large proportion of the dramas professing to deal with current social life the chief persons are the drones of society and the rich people of leisure or labour, most of them with handles or tails to their names. Half of our comedies are supposed to pass among the "nobs," and the middle-class characters are merely introduced as a necessary part of the machinery. It has been said that the British people dearly loves a lord, and a belief in this may be one reason why the upper ten thousand furnish so many of the heroes and heroines. A further fact is that certain managers are alleged to think that their theatres gain in dignity by presenting Mayfair plays, and perhaps there are players who take a great joy in appearing as Lord this, or Lady that, or the Honourable somebody. Indeed, there was a case where an actor-manager usurped a king's prerogative and transferred the chief characters in a play by a young dramatist to the celestial regions of Burke, notwithstanding the protest of the author, who admitted his absolute ignorance of the manners, ways of thought, and style in conversation of the inhabitants of Belgravia: no changes were made except in the names, and yet nobody suggested that the play was particularly rich in solecisms. This form of snobbery has at least one advantage, it saves the playwright from the trouble of considering the questions of money in the play. If there is to be an elopement in it there is no difficulty on the score of expense--a difficulty that, in vulgar real life, has caused some intrigues to become sordid hole-and-corner divorce dramas instead of idylls of passionate irregular love. One notices that certain professions are under a kind of ban upon the stage. The country contains thousands of solicitors, most of them well educated and drawn from the class that feeds the Bar, the Church, the Army, Navy, Medicine, Science and the Arts. This body of solicitors has an enormous influence upon the conscience of the country--more influence than any other class, except, perhaps, that of the parsons. How is the solicitor treated on the stage? Almost always with contempt, at the best as a humble adviser. He is the comic character or the villain; generally, as a further insult, the secondary villain. The attorney is sometimes the hero of a farce, as in _The Headless Man_--never in comedy, or to be more correct, hardly ever, for Mr Granville Barker in _The Voysey Inheritance_ gave a very fine and sympathetic study of a young solicitor. The dramatist may say in defence that he is truthful, that he merely reflects the vulgar prejudice against the profession, founded upon the misdeeds of a very small proportion of its members.