Mr "Percival" is really like the American who discovered on going home very late at night the fact that the sun rises in the east, and cackled as much about his discovery as a hen over her first egg. His explanation is that, "with one exception--Pinero--the English playwright invents a plot and then writes in characters to carry that plot out. Your French playwright does not do this.... He takes an idea and works it out with dramatic action instead of taking a dramatic action and working it out with such incident ideas as may happen along. And sometimes your French dramatist just takes people with characteristics and lets them work their own play out for him." There is no need to seek deeply to find out why "many more plays are successfully adopted from French into English than _vice versa_." The explanation is that owing to Parisian prejudice hardly any English plays of any merit, Shakespeare's excepted, have been adapted, and there is a ferocious hostility in France to foreign drama. The modern French drama may be better than the English; perhaps "Percival" hardly asserts that it is, unless in the passage already quoted and in this phrase: "There is something about three plays in four in France which is lacking at home, and that something is something good." No doubt, if we take the past fifty years as a basis for comparison of the two dramas, the French is the better; but during the last fifteen there has been a change, and one could not make any sweeping assertion upon the subject as regards the plays of this period, unless it be limited to the plays produced in the ordinary way of theatrical commerce. If the alleged superiority exists, one can offer two reasons for it without relying upon the brilliant discovery of "Percival." The first is the greater freedom of the French dramatist in choice of subject, and also in treatment; this gives him an enormous advantage. The second is that, whilst there are almost as many people in Paris who will welcome rubbish as there are in London, there can also be found a large number of playgoers with a good deal of intellectual curiosity, whilst the intelligent amateur--using the phrase in its French sense--is comparatively rare in London. Consequently, the French dramatist has not only more freedom in subject and treatment than the English, but in addition a greater public of playgoers who bring their intellect into the auditorium. Probably "Percival" will claim that this second ground of explanation enters into his, and there is some truth in this. On the other hand, his statement of fact that our dramatists, with the exception of Pinero, are mere story-tellers, and that the French authors write plays based upon ideas, is quite inaccurate.