Mr. Archer seems to forget that there is a prejudice among audiences as well as among individuals, and that every period of life has its own peculiar notions. Sometimes playgoers will receive an author's brightest comedy with coldness. The burden of Charles Lamb's reflections was--that the audience of his day came to the theatre to be complimented on its goodness. "The Stranger," "The Castle Spectre," and "George Barnwell," are specimens of the dramatic bill of fare which then found favour. On the other hand, the comic dramatists tried to disparage purity in men and women, and the sparkle of their comedies is unwholesome. In the opinion of many sober minds the dramatic literature of the Restoration is a blot upon our national history, while the gloomy productions that delighted the sentimental contemporaries of Charles Lamb are offences against dramatic art. At neither period was the drama national, in so far as it was representative of the tastes of all classes. Congreve and Wycherly wrote for the fashionable, while the admirers of Lillo's and Lewis's moral dramas were chiefly respectable shopkeepers. It was in Shakespeare's day that the nobility and groundlings together resorted to the playhouse, constituting themselves at once the patrons and pupils of the drama. The Elizabethan playgoer had no desire to bias the judgment of the dramatist. It left him free to represent life vividly and truly. It even encouraged him to be studious of the playgoer's profit as well as of his pleasure. But the playgoers of the Restoration, and of the period that immediately succeeded it, were intolerant of all views but their own. They regarded with disfavour plays which did not uphold their notions of amusement and morality. They called upon the dramatist to accept the opinion of his public, in these matters, as being superior to his own. As a consequence, the drama suffered in the attempt made to reconcile principles that are in themselves inconsistent, and the judgment of the audience was in no sense a criterion of merit in a play. This explains why some good plays have been coldly received on their first appearance. "She Stoops to Conquer" would have failed but for the presence in the theatre of Dr. Johnson and his friends; Sheridan's "Rivals," an even more brilliant comedy, did not secure a fair hearing on its first performance. Of Diderot's comedy, the "Pere de Famille," its author gives us the following information: "And why did this piece, which nowadays fills the house before half-past four, and which the players always put up when they want a thousand crowns, have so lukewarm a welcome at first?" "... If I did not succeed at first it was because the style was new to the audience and actors; because there was a strong prejudice, still existing, against what people call tearful comedy; because I had a crowd of enemies at court, in town, among magistrates, among Churchmen, among men of letters."