Even Sir Arthur Pinero in his juvenile pieces fell victim to a prevailing epidemic of epigram. At least, I can adduce one specimen of his youthful effort in his very youthful play, ‘Imprudence.’ As it was unsuccessful it has remained unpublished, and I must therefore rely on my memory. The lovers have quarreled and parted forever. This is at an afternoon tea; and when the time comes for the young lady to go home, the young gentleman approaches her with the courteously formal query, “Shall I call you a hansom?” To which she retorts, “You are mean enough to call me anything!” Many things, no doubt, must be pardoned to a young lady who is desperately in love and who has just broken with her devoted lover; but this impossible repartee is not one of them. Sir Arthur Pinero’s dialog in his later social dramas is nervous, tense, highly individual, and totally devoid of these outgrown artificialities; and in them he evokes laughter by the clash of character on character. His piercing sayings are the product of essential wisdom and not of external wit. It is evidence of Molière’s early maturity that there are no _mots d’esprit_ even in his most brilliant comedies. He eschewed the empty witticism; and in his ‘Criticism of the School for Wives’ he explained with conscious pride that the jokes in his dialog were not put there for their own sake; they were meant to illustrate situation and character. Molière has his clever sayings, his epigrams and his aphorisms, but they are always germane; they are _mots de situation_ and _mots de caractère_, and never merely _mots d’esprit_. More than any other comic dramatist does Molière deserve the praise that William Archer once bestowed on Bronson Howard, that his good things grow out of his story, “like blossoms on a laburnum,” and are not “stuck on like candles on a Christmas tree.” The same commendation may be given to Sir James Barrie, who has now come into his own and has conquered his juvenile tendency to get his laugh by whimsicalities lugged in by main strength,—like the husband’s amputation of the excrescences of his wife’s hat, in the ‘Professor’s Love Story.’ In the later ‘Dear Brutus’ the whole fabric of the story is whimsical and fantastic, fanciful and delightful. To a play like this we may apply Goethe’s characterization of Claude Lorraine’s faery palaces, that it was “absolute truth—without a sign of reality.” At its performance little ripples of intimate laughter ran around the audience, never breaking into a unanimous guffaw. The humor of the dialog may be, as indeed it must be, the humor of Barrie himself; but it seems to us the spontaneous utterance of the character from whose mouth it comes. IV