When the collection was first conceived, there was every indication that permission would be granted me to reproduce at least one of the Robert Montgomery Bird manuscripts, now owned by the University of Pennsylvania. Naturally, a collection of representative plays should include either Bird's "The Gladiator," or one of his other more or less oratorical and poetical pieces, written under the inspiration of Edwin Forrest. The intention to include John Augustus Stone's "Metamora" brought to light, after correspondence with the Forrest Home in Philadelphia, that either the manuscript of that play has irrevocably been destroyed, or else has been preserved so carefully that no one remotely connected with the actor Forrest has thus far been able to locate it. Only a few well remembered speeches and isolated scenes are seemingly left of a play which increased so largely the fame of Mr. Forrest. In the selection of _types_ my attention naturally became centered on the characters of _Colonel Mulberry Sellars_, and _Judge Bardwell Slote_, the former in a dramatization of "The Gilded Age," by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, and the latter, in a play by Benjamin E. Woolf, called "The Mighty Dollar." Extended investigation revealed the fact that, even if the plays are not lost, they are still unlocated, by the literary executors of Mark Twain on the one hand, and by the family of Mr. Woolf on the other. It is well to mention these instances, because, until the recent interest in the origins of American drama, manifest on all sides, there has been a danger that many most valuable manuscript plays would be lost to the student forever. At a revival of individual scenes from distinctive American Plays, given in New York, on January 22, 1917, considerable difficulty was experienced before the stock-company manuscript of Frank E. Murdoch's "Davy Crockett" was procured. This play, old-fashioned in its general development, is none the less representative of old-time melodramatic situation and romantic manipulation, and there is every reason to believe that, with the tremendous changes in theatrical taste, unless this play is published in available printed form, it will be lost to the student of ten years from now. The play would have been included in the present edition if space had allowed.