Well, to understand Robertson’s success, we have to think ourselves back into his time. We have to ignore what followed him and to see what he displaced. Up to his date the theatre, under the great French influence of the ’thirties, still remained romantic. But that influence was wearing out. A new influence was making itself felt in France, through the dialectics of Dumas _fils_ and Augier’s commonsense, though the new influence still bore trace of the old romanticism, as we can see at least to-day. _La Dame aux Camélias_, so romantic to-day, was greeted in 1855 as a masterpiece of realism! And it _was_ comparatively realistic, realistic for its time. But the English theatre, a second-hand theatre, still stuck to the old French romantic tradition. It lived largely on adaptations from Scribe. Robertson himself adapted a Scribe play (and not a bad one), _Bataille de Dames_. He had, however, come under the newer, the realistic, or romantico-realistic influence. He adapted Augier’s _L’Aventurière_. Tom Stylus’s pipe in the ballroom (in _Society_) had previously been dropped by Giboyer in _Les Effrontés_. I cannot help thinking that the new French reaction had a good deal to do with the Robertsonian reaction, certainly as much as the influence of Thackeray to which Sir Arthur Pinero traces it. But I must let Sir Arthur speak for himself. In a letter in which he has been so good as to remind me of to-morrow’s date he says:— “I look upon Robertson as a genius. Not that he wrote anything very profound, or anything very witty, but because, at a time when the English stage had sunk to even a lower ebb than it is usually credited with reaching; when the theatres stank of stale gas and orange-peel and the higher drama was represented mainly by adaptations from Scribe by Leicester Buckingham; he had the vision to see that a new public could be created, and an old and jaded one refreshed, by invoking for dramatic purposes the spirit, and using some part of the method, of Thackeray.”