It was in the minor theatres of Paris at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth that there was slowly developed a new type of play, the melodrama. Its first masters were Ducange and Pixérécourt, who had profited by the experience of their ruder forerunners and who taught the secrets of their special craft to their more expert followers, the fertile Bouchardy, for one, and, for another, the only lately departed Dennery, the most adroit and the most inventive of them all. A melodrama may be described briefly as a play with a plot and nothing but a plot; it abounds in situations enthralling, intricately combined and adroitly presented; and it contains characters simplified to types, drawn in profile and violently stencilled with the primary colors. It has a Hero, who struggles against his fate and struggles in vain until the final episode, when the Villain, as black as he is painted, is cast into outer darkness, the entirely white Hero being then rewarded for all his sufferings and for all his struggles with the hand of the equally pale Heroine, truly the female of his species. The melodrama may be devoid of veracity, but it is compelling in its progressive interest. It is dextrously devised to delight audiences which want “to be harrowed (and even slightly shocked) from eight to ten-thirty, and then consoled and reassured before eleven.” In short, it is “a tragedy with a happy ending.” What could be more tragic than the tale of the ‘Two Orphans’? In that ultimate masterpiece of melodrama, two lovely sisters, one of them blind, are severally lost in Paris in the wickedest days of the Regency. We are made to follow their appalling misadventures; and we behold them again and again in danger of death and worse than death. The sword of Damocles was suspended over their fair heads from the first rising of the curtain until within five minutes of its final fall. The odds are a hundred to one, nay, a thousand to one, against their escaping unscathed from their manifold perils. And yet, nevertheless, at the very end, the clouds lift, sunshine floods the stage; and the two heroines are left at last to live happy like two princesses with their two princes in the most entrancing of fairy tales. And many thousand Parisian audiences, laying aside their intellectual honesty for the occasion, dilated with the right emotion, sobbed at the sorrows of the sisters, cheered the rescuers and venomously hissed the villains who had pursued them.