It is hard to say exactly what qualities ensure stage success. As reading plays, Lillo’s “George Barnwell” is intolerably stilted, Knowles’s “Virginius” insipid, “The Lady of Lyons” tawdry; yet all of them took notoriously, and the last two—as any one can testify who has seen them performed—retain a certain effectiveness even now. Perhaps the secret lies in simplicity and directness of construction, unrelaxing tension, quick movement, and an instinctive seizure of the essentially dramatic crises in the action. In a word, the thing has “go”; lacking which, no cleverness of dialogue, no epigrammatic sharpness of wit or delicate play of humor can save a comedy; and no beauty of style, no depth or reach of thought, a tragedy. Hence it is pertinent to remark how many popular playwrights have been actors or in close practical relations with the theatre. In the seventeenth century this was a matter of course. Shakespeare was an actor, and Molière and Jonson and Marlowe and Greene and Otway, and countless others. Cibber was an actor and stage-manager. Sheridan and both Colmans were managers. Garrick and Foote wrote plays as well as acted them. Knowles, Boucicault, Robertson, Pinero and Stephen Phillips have all been actors. Conceded that this professional point of view has been rightly emphasized, yet before the acted drama can rank as literature, or even hope to hold possession of the stage itself for more than a season, it must stand a further test. It must read well, too. If it is no more than an after-dinner amusement, without intellectual meaning or vital relation to life: if it has neither strength nor truth nor beauty as a criticism of life, or an imaginative representation of life, what interest can it have for serious people? Let us stay at home and read our Thackeray. Eugène Scribe was perhaps the cunningest master of stagecraft who ever wrote. Schlegel ranked him above Molière. He left the largest fortune ever accumulated by a French man of letters. His plays were more popular in all the theatres of Europe than anything since Kotzebue’s melodramas; and all European purveyors for the stage strove to imitate the adroitness and ingenuity with which his plots were put together. But if one to-day tries to _read_ any one of his three hundred and fifty pieces—say, “Adrienne Lecouvreur” or “La Bataille des Dames”—one will find little in them beyond the mechanical perfection of the construction, and will feel how powerless mere technical cleverness is to keep alive false and superficial conceptions.