the other hand, “In a Balcony,” though very intelligently and sympathetically presented by Mrs. Lemoyne and Otis Skinner, was too subtle for a popular audience, and was manifestly unfitted for the stage. The closet drama is a quite legitimate product of literary art. The playhouse has no monopoly of the dramatic form. Indeed, as the closet dramatist is not bound to consider the practical exigencies of the theatre, to consult the prejudices of the manager or the spectators, fill the pockets of the company, or provide a rôle for a star performer, he has, in many ways, a freer hand than the professional playwright. He need not sacrifice truth of character and probability of plot to the need of highly accentuated situations. He does not have to consider whether a speech is too long, too ornate in diction, too deeply thoughtful for recitation by an actor. If the action lags at certain points, let it lag. In short, as the aim of the closet dramatist is other than the playwright’s, so his methods may be independent. In the rather bitter preface to the printed version of “Saints and Sinners” (1891), Mr. Henry Arthur Jones complains of “the English practice of writing plays to order for a star performer,” together with other “binding and perplexing . . . conventions and limitations of playwriting,” as “quite sufficient to account for the literary degradation of the modern drama.” The English closet drama of the nineteenth century is an important body of literature, of higher intellectual value than all the stage plays produced in England during the same period. It is not necessary to enumerate its triumphs: I will merely remind the reader, in passing, that work like Byron’s “Manfred,” Landor’s “Gebir,” George Eliot’s “The Spanish Gypsy,” Beddoes’s “Death’s Jest-Book,” Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna,” Tennyson’s “Becket,” Browning’s “Pippa Passes” and Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon,” is justified in its assumption of the dramatic form, though its appeal is only to the closet reader. I do not forget that one or two of these have been tried upon the stage, but they do not belong there, and, as theatre pieces, were flat failures.