It is not that English men of letters have been unwilling to contribute to the stage. On the contrary, they have shown an eager, although mostly ineffectual, ambition for dramatic honors. In the eighteenth century it was well-nigh the rule that a successful writer should try his hand at a play. Addison did so, and Steele, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Johnson, Goldsmith, Smollett, Thomson, Mason, Mallet, Chatterton, and many others who had no natural turn for it, and would not think of such a thing now. In the nineteenth century the tradition had lost much of its force: still, we find Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Thackeray, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, all using the dramatic form, and some of them attempting the stage. Charles Lamb, one of the most ardent of playgoers and best of dramatic critics, was greatly chagrined by the failure of his farce, “Mr. H——.” Dickens was a good actor in private theatricals, and was intensely concerned with the theatre and the theatrical fortunes of his own dramatized novels. So was Charles Reade, who collaborated with Tom Taylor in a number of plays, and whose theatre piece “Masks and Faces,” was the original of his novelette, “Peg Woffington”—_vice versa_ the usual case. More recently we have seen Stevenson and Henley collaborating in three plays, “Deacon Brodie” and “Beau Austin,” performed at London and Montreal in 1884–87, and “Admiral Guinea,” shown at the Haymarket in 1890; the first and third, low-life melodrama and broad comedy, of some vigor but no great importance; the second, an unusually good eighteenth century society play. Most certainly these experiments do not rank with Stevenson’s romances or Henley’s poems. Another curious illustration of the attraction of the dramatic form for the literary mind is Thomas Hardy’s “The Dynasts” (1904), a drama of the Napoleonic wars, projected in nineteen acts, with choruses of spirits and personified abstractions; a sort of reversion to the class of morality and chronicle play exemplified in Bale’s “King John.” Mr. Hardy is perhaps the foremost living English novelist, but “The Dynasts” is a dramatic monster, and, happily, a torso. The preface confesses that the abortion is a “panoramic show” and intended for “mental performance” only, and suggests an apology for closet drama by inquiring whether “mental performance alone may not eventually be the fate of all drama other than that of contemporary or frivolous life.”