Then, crushed by rules and weakened as refined, For years the power of Tragedy declined: From bard to bard the frigid caution crept, Till declamation roared whilst passion slept. Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread; Philosophy remained though nature fled. But, forced at length her ancient reign to quit, She saw great Faustus lay the ghost of wit: Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day, And pantomime and song confirmed her sway— That is, as has been complained a hundred times before and since, the opera and the spectacular show drove the legitimate drama from the stage. The theatre, indeed, is not dead: it has continued to live and to flourish, and is furnishing entertainment to the public to-day, as it did two hundred—nay, two thousand—years ago. The theatre, as an institution, has a life of its own, whose history is recorded in innumerable volumes. Playhouses have multiplied in London, in the provinces, in all English-speaking lands. The callings of the actor and the playwright have given occupation to many, and rich rewards to not a few. Scholars, critics, and literary men are apt to look at the drama as if it were simply a department of literature. In reading a play, we should remember that we are taking the author at a disadvantage. It is not meant to be read, but to be acted. It is not mere literature: it is both more and less than literature. The art of the theatre is a composite art, requiring the help of the scene-painter, the costumer, the manager, the stage-carpenter, sometimes of the musician and dancer, nowadays of the electrician; and always and above all demanding the interpretation of the actor. It is not addressed to the understanding exclusively, but likewise to the eye and the ear. It is a show, as well as a piece of writing. The drama can subsist without any dialogue at all, as in the pantomime; or with the dialogue reduced to its lowest terms, as in the Italian _commedie a soggetto_, where the actors improvised the lines. “The skeleton of every play is a pantomime,” says Professor Brander Matthews, who reminds us that not only buffoonery and acrobatic performances may be carried on silently by stock characters like Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, and Punchinello; but a story of a more pretentious kind may be enacted entirely by gesture and dumb show, as in the French pantomime play “_L’Enfant Prodigue_.” A good dramatist includes a good playwright, one who can invent striking situations, telling climaxes, tableaux, _ensemble_ scenes, spectacular and histrionic effects, _coups de théâtre_. These things may seem to the literary student the merely mechanical or technical parts of the art. Yet, without them, a play will be amateurish, and no really successful dramatist has ever been lacking in this kind of skill.