The vast army devoted to science is almost ignored, though sometimes the inventor has a kind of "innings": in _The Middleman_ Mr Henry Arthur Jones made a striking figure of him. Financiers, business men, merchants and the like have little justice done to them. To the dramatist the fraudulent is the only interesting financier. He certainly is very fond of working on the _Mercadet_ basis. He commonly confounds the stockbroker with the bucket-shop keeper, and invariably assumes that the company promoter is a thief. The merchant or manufacturer tends to replace the French uncle from America, and his wealth rather than himself is employed by the playwright to get his characters out of a mess. The novelist or poet is a difficult person for stage treatment; the pictures of the dramatist in the theatre are curiously unlifelike--as unlifelike as the theatrical managers on the stage. There are reasons for this that need not be discussed. It seems a pity that the playwrights, when dealing with life in the strata above shopkeeping, should not apply themselves more fully to the study of the enormous class which is the backbone of the country, instead of choosing so often merely the idle classes, members of which as a rule are less highly individualized. One may apply to the characters in many of our comedies certain phrases used by Théophile Gautier: "The personages belong to no particular time or country. They come and go without our knowing why or how; they neither eat nor drink, they do not live in any particular place, and have no _métier_." The "neither eat nor drink," of course, is quite inapplicable; we have far too much eating and drinking on the stage. The low, comic meals of the Adelphi are replaced by similar or slightly more "genteel" humours of comic eating in comedies. It may be that this phenomenon is due to a belief that playgoers want to see something in the theatres far divorced from its ordinary life, but this belief seems hardly consistent with certain notable tendencies towards realism. Undoubtedly the public has not grown tired of plays dealing seriously with current human life; it has had no opportunity of growing tired of them. Since this was written the "Yellow Journalism" editor has twice appeared, once in the brilliant comedy called _What the Public Wants_, by Mr Arnold Bennett, where Mr James Hearn represented him superbly, and on the other occasion in Mr Fagan's clever work called _The Earth_, when Mr M'Kinnel acted ably. Also we have had an engineer in _The Building of Bridges_ and a doctor in _Fires of Fate_. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Our Stage and Its Critics by "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"