In his book on “The Renaissance of the Drama,” and in many other places, Mr. Jones has pleaded for a theatre which should faithfully reflect contemporary life; and in his own plays he has endeavored to furnish examples of what such a drama should be. His first printed piece, “Saints and Sinners” (exhibited in 1884), was hardly literature, and did not stamp its author as a first-class talent. It is a seduction play of the familiar type, with a set of stock characters: the villain; the forsaken maid; the steadfast lover who comes back from Australia with a fortune in the nick of time; the _père noble_, a country clergyman straight out of “The Vicar of Wakefield”; and a pair of hypocritical deacons in a dissenting chapel—very much overdone, _pace_ Matthew Arnold, who complimented Mr. Jones on those concrete examples of middle-class Philistinism, with its alliterative mixture of business and bethels. Mr. Jones, like Mr. Shaw, is true to the tradition of the stage in being fiercely anti-Puritan, and wastes many words in his prefaces in vindicating the right of the theatre to deal with religious hypocrisy; as if Tartuffe and Tribulation Wholesome had not been familiar comedy heroes for nearly three hundred years! This dramatist served his apprenticeship in melodrama, as Pinero did in farce; and there are signs of the difference in his greater seriousness, or heaviness. Indeed, an honest feeling and an earnest purpose are among his best qualities. M. Filon thinks him the most English of contemporary writers for the stage. And, as Pinero’s art has gained in depth, Jones’s has gained in lightness. Crude at first, without complexity or shading in his character-drawing, without much art in comic dialogue or much charm and distinction in serious, he has advanced steadily in grasp and skill and sureness of touch, and stands to-day in the front rank of modern British dramatists. “The Crusaders,” “The Case of Rebellious Susan,” “The Masqueraders,” “Judah,” “The Liars,” are all good plays—or, at least plays with good features—and certainly fall within the line which divides literary drama from the mere stage play. “Judah,” for instance, is a solidly built piece, with two or three strong situations. The heroine is a fasting girl and miraculous healer, a subject of a kind which Hawthorne often chose; or reminding one of Mr. Howells’s charlatans in “The Undiscovered Country” and Mr. James’s in “The Bostonians.” The characterization of the leading persons is sound, and there is a brace of very diverting broad comedy figures, a male and a female scientific prig. They are slightly caricatured—Jones is still a little heavy-handed—but the theatre must over-accentuate now and again, just as actresses must rouge.