Since then, the French, whose ideal is not so much fulness of life as perfection of form, have taught English playwrights many lessons. Brunetière, speaking of the gradual evolution and differentiation of literary kinds (_genres_), says that Shakespeare’s theatre, as theatre, exhibits the art of drama in its infancy. Perhaps, then, no hard and fast line can be drawn between an acting drama and a closet play. It is largely a matter of contemporary taste. “Cato,” we know, made a prodigious hit. Coleridge’s “Remorse,” a closet drama if there ever was one, and a very rubbishy affair at that, was put on by Sheridan, though with many misgivings, and lasted twenty nights, a good run for those days. No audience now would stand it an hour. And yet we have seen Sir Henry Irving forcing Tennyson’s dramatic poems into a temporary _succès d’estime_. “Samson Agonistes” is a closet play, without question; but is “The Cenci”? Shelley wanted it played, and had selected Miss O’Niel for the rôle of Beatrice. But it never got itself played till 1889, when it was given before the Shelley Society at South Kensington. The picked audience applauded it, just as an academic audience will applaud a rehearsal of the “Antigone” in the original Greek; but the dramatic critics sent down by the London newspapers to report the performance were unconvinced. Let it be granted, then, that the question in the case of any given play is a question of more or less. Still, the difference between our modern literary drama, as a whole, and the Elizabethan drama,—which was also literary,—as a whole, I take to be this: that in our time literature has lost touch with the stage. In the seventeenth century, the poets _wrote for_ the theatre. They knew that their plays would be played. In the nineteenth century, English poets who adopted the dramatic framework did not write for the theatre. They did not expect their pieces to be played, and they addressed themselves consciously to the reader. When one of them had the luck to get upon the boards, it was an exception, and the manager generally lost money by it. Thus, in the late thirties and early forties, in one of those efforts to “elevate the stage,” which recur with comic persistence in our dramatic annals, Macready rallied the _literati_ to his aid and presented, among other things, Taylor’s “Philip Van Artevelde,” Talfourd’s “Ion,” Bulwer’s “Richelieu” and “The Lady of Lyons,” and Browning’s “Stafford” and “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.” The only titles on this list that secured a permanent foothold on the repertoire of the playhouses were Bulwer’s two pieces, which were precisely the most flimsy of the whole lot, from the literary point of view. “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon” has been tried again. As I saw it a number of years ago, with Lawrence Barrett cast for Lord Tresham and Marie Wainwright as Mildred, it seemed to me—in spite of its somewhat absurd _motivirung_—decidedly impressive as an acting play. On