Of course, if upon our playwrights is imposed the limitation that all their plays must contain a love-story, the difficulty of the position is very great, and the greater still because they are not allowed to tell naughty love-stories unless they force upon them a moral ending, and they are very rarely permitted to indulge in a love-story which does not end in a wedding or the reconciliation of respectably wedded citizens. No wonder that as a body they seem to be getting bankrupt in imagination; they appear to be in the position of a cook who is never allowed to handle anything but sweets. The state of things is rather curious. It may be often asserted truthfully of the West End theatres that there are as many love-stories as playhouses. Of late years, notwithstanding the evidence referred to, some of our novelists have shown a tendency to break away from the tradition; also some of the unfashionable playwrights exhibit signs of revolt; but the managers are timid, very timid, in the matter, and this is curious, because one has only to turn to Shakespeare to see that we have had modern successes with plays in which the love-story is trifling when it exists at all--_Hamlet_, for instance, and _Macbeth_, _Julius Caesar_, _King Lear_, _Henry VIII._, and other historical pieces. Indeed, as soon as one begins to enumerate it appears that in most of the Shakespearean plays presented of late years the love interest, if any, has been a minor matter. Our managers might learn something from this. There is mighty little sentimental love in the plays of "G.B.S." that have, or have had, a perilously disturbing vogue. And, indeed, when that ferocious dramatist does handle love it is in an intensely unsentimental fashion. Moreover, love in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas is treated with cruel levity. Turn, by the way, to another great social satirist, Molière; one finds again that love sometimes is ignored, and when handled at all often treated dryly, or as a matter of little moment. Our most popular comedy, _The School for Scandal_, though it has a reconciliation business, is quite independent of any sentimental matter of importance. In several of the works of Mr Barrie, our most original popular dramatist, the sentimental interest is slight where it exists at all.