They write farces or comedies, in an orthodox form, which contain a surprisingly small number of jokes or efforts at wit and humour. Their works have the air of being mere preliminary plays--the playwrights apparently have set out scenes and written dialogue intended to indicate the nature of the proposed piece with the view afterwards not, indeed of polishing, for there is nothing to polish, but of rewriting, putting in the vital passages during the process. One cannot offer any useful advice to these people, save that of suggesting they should turn their attention to gardening or golf. They have only one fault, and it is that they have no quality. Such writers, as a rule, have at least one small quite useless virtue--their pieces are not ridiculously unsuitable in point of form for the stage. A more interesting class consists of authors who possess some talent and no idea how to use it. They write comedies which have some clever passages, some lines witty enough to deserve a laugh, and exhibit capacity in character-drawing, but are not at all in an acceptable form. A comedy in six acts, with twenty scenes, would not be considered for a moment by a modern manager. We have returned in a curious way to something like the ideas underlying "the unities"; perhaps that statement is incorrect, but, at least, we have put upon our dramatists certain working laws almost as embarrassing as the unities. The average playgoer has no idea of the skill involved in writing the ordinary successful comedy of the present time. The modern dramatist has nothing approaching the licence of his predecessors. Construction was comparatively easy in the time of a Sheridan or a Goldsmith; not only were they allowed to use explanatory dialogue, in which A told B a number of things which B knew already, because the author desired the audience to learn them; but they were permitted to give direct statements of fact in soliloquies. Such licence has gone: asides are dead, statements of fact in soliloquies are only permitted in formal tragedies. Moreover, having the right to make almost an unlimited number of changes of scenery, they were enabled to present in action the facts which in our days have to be told to the audience in dialogue--dialogue written under severe limitations. In consequence, the mechanical difficulties of construction were then very small. Nowadays, except in the case of melodrama, complicated stories have to be told in three or four acts, with no change of scenery during an act.