When we turn the pages of that history in search of support for this suggestion, we find it abundantly and super-abundantly. The succession of comic operas which Gilbert devised to be set to music by Sullivan reveal at once that they were contrived with reference to the capacity and to the characteristics of the chief members of the company at the Savoy Theater. The sequence of broadly humorous pieces, farces which almost rose to be comedies and comedies which almost relaxed into farces, written by Labiche, and by Meilhac and Halévy for the Palais Royal theater were all of them so put together as to provide appropriate parts for the quartet of comedians who made that little house the home of perennial laughter in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. At the same time Meilhac and Halévy were contriving for the Variétés the librettos of ‘Barbe-Bleue’ and the ‘Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein,’ ‘Belle Hélène’ and ‘La Périchole,’ a series of opera-bouffes enhanced by the scintillating rhythms of Offenbach and adroitly adapted to the special talents of Schneider, of Dupuis and of several of the other more or less permanent members of the company. Almost simultaneously Augier and the younger Dumas were giving to the Comédie-Française their social dramas, always carefully made-to-order to suit the half-dozen leading members of the brilliant company Perrin was then guiding. The ‘Fourchambault’ of Augier and the ‘Étrangère’ of Dumas are masterpieces of this profitable utilization of the pronounced personalities of the performers. The ‘Étrangère,’ in particular, would have been a very different play if it had not contained characters made-to-order for Sarah Bernhardt and Croizette, Got and Coquelin. A little earlier the series of blank verse plays written by Gilbert for the Haymarket Theater, of which ‘Pygmalion and Galatea’ won the most protracted popularity, had their leading characters plainly made-to-order for Mr. and Mrs. Kendal and for Buckstone himself. And just as ‘Richard III’ and ‘King Lear’ are none the worse because the central character was conceived also as an acting part for Burbage, so Gilbert’s blank verse pieces, Augier’s social dramas, Meilhac and Halévy’s farcical comedies lost nothing by their owing some portion of their inspiration to the necessity of fitting the accomplished comedians by whom the outstanding characters were to be impersonated. I venture to express the opinion that this desire to bring out the best the several actors had to give was helpful rather than not, stimulatingly suggestive to the author when he was setting his invention to work.