When we turn back the pages of stage-history from the nineteenth century to the eighteenth we find perhaps the most striking of all instances of made-to-order parts,—an instance which shows us not one or two or three characters in a play, but almost every one of them, composed and elaborated with an eye single to the original performers. The ‘School for Scandal’ has been seen by hundreds and read by thousands, who have enjoyed its effective situations, its sparkling dialog and its contrasted characters, without any suspicion that the persons of the play were made-to-order parts. Yet this undisputed masterpiece of English comedy is what it is because its clever author had succeeded to the management of Drury Lane, where Garrick had gathered an incomparable company of comedians; and in writing the ‘School for Scandal’ Sheridan peopled his play with the characters which the members of this company could personate most effectively. King was Sir Peter, Mrs. Abington was Lady Teazle, Palmer was Joseph Surface, Smith was Charles Surface; and they were so perfectly fitted that they played with effortless ease. So closely did Sheridan identify the parts with the performers that when a friend asked him why he had written a five-act comedy ending in the marriage of Charles and Maria without any love-scene for this couple, he is reported to have responded: “But I couldn’t do it. Smith can’t make love—and nobody would want to make love to Priscilla Hopkins!” III It may be objected that Sheridan and Augier and Dumas were after all dextrous playwrights and that they are no one of them to be ranked with the truly great dramatists. While they might very well be willing once in a way to turn themselves into dramaturgic tailors, this is a servile complaisance of which the mighty masters of the drama would never be guilty, from which indeed they would shrink with abhorrence. But if we turn the pages of stage-history still further back, from the eighteenth century to the seventeenth, we discover that Molière did this very thing, the adjustment of a whole play to the actors who were to perform it, not once as Sheridan did, but repeatedly and regularly and in all his pieces, in his loftiest comedies no less than his broadest and most boisterous farces. And there will be found few competent critics to deny that Molière is one of the supreme leaders of the drama, with an indisputable right to a place by the side of Sophocles and Shakspere, even if he does not climb to the austere and lofty heights of tragedy.