Glancing over Clement Scott’s list, old playgoers will find their memories somewhat pathetically stirred by forgotten fashions and schools. There are Planché’s extravaganzas, and later Dion Boucicault’s versatilities—“classical” comedies like “London Assurance,” sentimental Irish melodramas—“The Shaughraun,” “The Colleen Bawn”—and popular favorites, such as “Rip Van Winkle”; the equally versatile Tom Taylor, with his “Our American Cousin,” “The Ticket-of-Leave Man,” etc.; Burnand’s multifarious _facetiae_; the cockney vulgarities of that very prolific Mr. H. J. Byron; and, in the late sixties, Robertson’s “cup-and-saucer” comedies—“Ours,” “Caste,” “Society,” “School.” Three thousand representations of these fashionable comedies were given inside of twenty years. How gay, how brilliant, even, the dialogue seemed to us in those good old days! But take up the text of one of Tom Robertson’s plays now and try to read it. What has become of the sparkle? Does any one recall the famous “Ours” _galop_ that we used to dance to _consule Planco? Eheu fugaces!_ The playwriters whom I have named, and others whom I might have named, their contemporaries, were the Clyde Fitches, Augustus Thomases, and George Ades of their generation. They provided a fair article of entertainment for the public of their time, but they added nothing to literature. The poverty of the English stage, during these late centuries, in work of real substance and value, is the more striking because there has been no dearth of genius in other departments. There have been great English poets, novelists, humorists, essayists, critics, historians. Moreover, the literary drama has flourished in other countries. France has never lacked accomplished artists in this kind: from Voltaire to Victor Hugo, from Hugo to Rostand, talent always, and genius not unfrequently, have been at the service of the French theatres. In Germany—with some breaks—the case has been the same. From Lessing and Goethe and Schiller down to our own contemporaries, to Hauptmann, Sudermann, and Halbe, Germany has seldom been without worthy dramatists. Both the Germans and the French have taken the theatre seriously. Their actors have been carefully trained, their audiences intelligently critical, their playhouses in part maintained by government subventions, as institutions importantly related to the national life.