No wonder the playwright has tried to adapt _Frankenstein_; he has merely succeeded in presenting a grotesque unterrible figure where Mrs Shelley gave a thrill of horror. We have had several plays on the boards which overstep bounds. One can read Mr Jerome's tale "The Passing of the Third Floor Back" without being oppressed by a sense of the inadequacy of his machinery, but when Mr Forbes Robertson is supposed on the stage to "blarney" eight or nine people who have ugly souls into righteousness we are not only unconvinced but actively incredulous. Possibly to simple minds the affair would be more impressive if the lodger wore a halo supposed to be invisible to the people on the stage, or produced an occasional flash of lightning or growl of thunder. Take that dear old crusted melodrama _The Corsican Brothers_. The story was thrilling enough when merely read; it was easy to believe that the Dei Franchi had a special brand of constitution which enabled them to see the family ghost whilst the more sceptical could talk of brain waves and suggestions and of subjective phenomena. That is where the modern novelist gets out of all hobbles; if you will not accept his spook as a genuine, old-fashioned spook, you can hardly refuse to swallow it as a subjective phenomenon. The blessed word "subjective" extricates him from all troubles. The poor dramatist has no such refuge. Occasionally he can work his plot by means of a vision; and the hypnotic trance has served, as in the case of _The Polish Jew_; but his ghosts have to be strictly objective. In fact, using a technical term frivolously, his ghosts expect the ghost to walk regularly on Fridays. There is no humbug about them; no "Pepper"--but they have to be taken with a ton of salt! This difficulty was, perhaps, of no great importance at a time when most people had faith in ghosts; when the most sceptical did not go further than Madame de Staël, who alleged that she did not believe in them but was afraid of them. It is not recorded what Benjamin Constant, her unhappy lover, thought about them. Nowadays things have changed and ghosts and the personal devil have joined the ranks of the unemployed, or only obtain employment with Mr Stead and his Julia. There is, of course, the spook of the spiritualist, who demands serious consideration; but plays dealing with spiritualism are not common. Perhaps because such playgoers as will accept the more or less material ghost are even more sceptical than the scientific as to the objective phenomena of the spiritualist. No doubt managers try to rise to the occasion and to make a steady advance in ghosts, devils and angels, but the mechanical improvements seem small. Indeed, in a sense there has been no advance since the days when Pepper's ghost terrified us at the poor old Polytechnic, and unfortunately the system of Pepper can only be used to a limited extent. There were moments of thrill in _Ulysses_ at His Majesty's.