Momentary aberrations of fashion must not deceive us as to the general tendency of taste. Mr. Hall Caine would have us believe that the public has suddenly gone crazy for stage-plays. "Novels of great strength and originality," says the author of _The Scapegoat_, "occasionally appear without creating more than a flutter of interest, and, meanwhile, plays of one-tenth their power and novelty are making something like a profound impression." What plays are these? Not the Ollendorfian attitudinisings of M. Maeterlinck, surely! The fact is that two years ago it would have been impossible for any one to pen that sentence of Mr. Caine's, and it is now possible merely because a passion for the literary drama has been flogged into existence by certain able critics. With a limited class, the same class which appreciates poetry, the literary drama may find a welcome; but to suppose that it competes, or can, in this country, even pretend to compete, with the novel is a delusion, and Mr. Caine may safely abandon his locusts and wild honey. That we see around us a great interest in the drama is, of course, a commonplace. But how much of that is literary? When the delights of the eye are removed from the sum of pleasure, what is left? Our public is interested in the actors and their art, in the scenery and the furniture, in the notion of large sums of money expended, lost, or won. When all these incidental interests are extracted from the curiosity excited by a play, not very much is left for the purely literary portion of it--not nearly so much, at all events, as is awakened by a great novel. After all that has been said about the publication of plays, I expect that the sale of dramatic contemporary literature remains small and uncertain. Mr. Pinero is read; but one swallow does not make a summer. Where are the dramatic works of Mr. Sydney Grundy, which ought--if Mr. Caine be correct--to be seen on every book-shelf beside the stories of Mr. Hawley Smart?