In the appendix to Clement Scott’s “The Drama of Yesterday and To-day” there is given, by way of supplement to Genest, a list of the new plays put on at London theatres between 1830 and 1900. They number about twenty-four hundred; and—until we reach the last decade of the century—it would be hard to pick out a dozen of them which have become a part of English literature: which any one would think of reading for pleasure or profit, as one reads, say, the plays of Marlowe or Fletcher or Congreve. Of course, many of the pieces on the list are of non-literary kinds—burlesques, vaudevilles, operas, and the like. Then there is a large body of translations and adaptations from the foreign drama, more especially from the French of Scribe, Sardou, Dumas, _père et fils_, d’Hennery, Labiche, Goudinet, Meilhac and Halévy, Ohnet, and many others. Next to the French theatre, the most abundant feeder of our modern stage has been contemporary fiction. Nowadays, every successful novel is immediately dramatized. This has been the case, more or less, for three-quarters of a century. The Waverley Novels were dramatized in their time, and Dickens’s stories in theirs, and there are a plenty of dramatized novels on Scott’s catalogue. But the practice has greatly increased of recent years. Now, for some reason, a dramatized novel seldom means a good play; that is to say, permanently good, though it may act fairly well for a season. One does not care to _read_ the stage version of “Vanity Fair,” known as “Becky Sharp,” any more than one would care to read “The School for Scandal” diluted into a novel. The dramatist conceives and moulds his theme otherwise than the novelist. “Playwriting,” says Walter Scott, “is the art of forming situations.” To be sure, Shakespeare took plots from Italian “novels,” so called; that is, short romantic tales like Boccaccio’s or Bandello’s. But he took only the bare outline, and altered freely. The modern novel is a far more elaborate thing. In it, not only incident and character, but a great part of the dialogue is already done to hand.