It is in England and in Germany that the undramatic critics have been permitted to disport themselves most freely and most frequently. In France they have never been encouraged to pernicious activity. That the French have not suffered from this pest may be due to the honorable existence of the Théâtre Français, where the masterpieces of French tragedy and of French comedy have been kept alive on the stage for which they had been written; or it may be due to the fact that in the literature of France the drama has been continuously more important than it has been in the literature of any other country. In England and in Germany the drama has had its seasons of abundance and its seasons of famine, whereas in France, altho there might be poor harvests for a succession of years, harvests of some sort there always have been. No period in French literature is as devoid of valid drama as that in English literature during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. From 1800 to 1870 the plays of our language which were actable were unreadable and the plays which were readable were unactable. It is in the periods of penury, when there is a divorce between literature and the drama, that the undramatic critic is inspired to chase rainbows. As there is then no vital drama in the theater, and as the pieces then exhibited on the stage have little validity, the undramatic critic is led to the conclusion that since the theater can get along without literature, so the drama can get along without the theater. And that way madness lies. There is this excuse for the supersubtle critics of the Italian Renascence that they lived not long removed from the middle ages, in which all memory of the acted drama had been lost and in which the belief was general that the comedies of Plautus and Terence had been composed, not for performance by actors in a theater and before an audience, but for a single reciter who should deal with them as a modern elocutionist might stand and deliver ‘Pippa Passes’ or the ‘Cenci.’ But there is no excuse for the English-speaking expounders of Sophocles and Shakspere, because they cannot help knowing that the plays of the Athenian were written to be performed in the Theater of Dionysus and that the plays of the Elizabethan were written to be performed in the Globe theater.