So it was that Michael Morton made a ‘Colonel Newcome’ piece for Beerbohm Tree in 1906 and that Langdon Mitchell made a ‘Major Pendennis’ piece for John Drew in 1916. So it was that Francis Burnand made a ‘Jeames’ piece for Edward Terry in 1878 out of the ‘Diary of C. Jeames de la Pluche.’ Altho Edward Terry was an amusing Jeames and altho Nelly Farren was an amusing Mary Ann Hoggins, the “New and Original Comedy” (as its adapter styled it) did not strike me as amusing in itself; it was three-quarters Burnand and barely one quarter Thackeray—and the blending was not to my taste. As I sat through the performance patiently I came to understand the provocation which had led a gallery boy to shout down to Burnand as he took the author’s curtain call on the first night,—“I say, Frank, it’s a good thing Thackeray is dead, isn’t it?” As the author had provided the ‘History of Henry Esmond’ with a unifying figure, the dramatizers have only too abundant material for a chronicle-play showing him at different periods in his long and honorable career. To make a compact play, a true drama, out of the protracted story, would be plainly impossible, yet it might not be so difficult to select salient episodes which would serve as a succinct summary of the story. But altho the attempt has been made several times—once for Henry Irving—no one of the versions has ever been put up for a run in any of the principal playhouses of either New York or London. In any dramatization one scene would impose itself, the scene in which Esmond breaks his sword before the prince whom he has loyally served, the scene in which Thackeray is most truly dramatic in the noblest sense of the word. If this had been put on the stage it would have been only a rendering unto the theater of a thing that belonged to the theater, since perhaps Thackeray had it suggested to him by the corresponding scene in the opera of ‘The Favorite’—altho the suggestion may also have come from the ‘Vicomte de Bragelonne’ or from the later play which Dumas made out of his own story. There remains to be mentioned only one other dramatization, that of the ‘Rose and the Ring,’ made by H. Savile Clark in 1890. From all accounts the performance of this little play, with its music by Walter Slaughter, provided a charming spectacle for children, one to which we may be sure that Thackeray would have had no objection and which indeed might have delighted his heart. IV