This brings us to the second reason for the disappearance of these Old Comedies from the twentieth century theater. Their departure was coincident with the breaking up of the stock-company, kept together year after year with only occasional changes in its membership. Forty years ago the company at Wallack’s, like that at the Boston Museum, was a homogeneous body, with customs of its own, imparted to the newcomers it enrolled and accepted reverently by these recruits. It was in the habit of appearing in one or more of the Old Comedies every winter; its elder members knew the traditional business and the traditional effects in each of these comic dramas; and they were glad to pass on this knowledge to the younger members. As a result of this an Old Comedy could always be used as a stop-gap when a new play had failed to please the public; and it could be brought out at a week’s notice. In other words, the stock-company was a repertory company, ready to revive on demand any one of a dozen or more Old Comedies and assured in advance that this revival would be welcome to a majority of the playgoers, many of whom would be glad of the chance to compare it with the performances of two or three seasons before. Altho these companies at Wallack’s in New York and later at Daly’s also, as well as that at the Museum in Boston, utilized the Old Comedies mainly as life-preservers, to be put on whenever new plays sank under them, they relied upon these new plays for the major part of their season, reserving their revivals for sudden contingencies. But these new plays of half-a-century ago were not widely unlike the Old Comedies in their external characteristics; they also had their soliloquies, their asides, and their bravura passages; they were also more or less arbitrary in plot, more or less artificial in dialog and more or less archaic in method, or at least they would so appear to us of the twentieth century if they could be galvanized into life again for our inspection. The pleasant comedies of T. W. Robertson, ‘Caste’ for one and ‘Ours’ for another, which were hailed on their first appearance as “natural” and even as “realistic,” have revealed themselves at their most recent resuscitations to be almost as mannered and as mechanical as were the Old Comedies. In fact, the more closely we study the English drama between 1860 and 1870 the more clearly we perceive the influence of the English drama between 1770 and 1780. In the century which stretches from 1770 to 1870 we can observe no violent break in the continuity of the development of the drama.