We next come to Sheridan, the man who wrote the best comedy in the English language, "School for Scandal." The secret of that play and the "Rivals" has been thought by some to consist in the dialogue, but dialogue alone never made a play run before a mixed audience. The worst dialogue in the "Black Crook"--and God knows it was bad enough--could not kill that play any more than the finest dialogue could make Tennyson's "Queen Mary" into a real play, or galvanize it into a semblance of interest before an audience. Sheridan has more than witty dialogue. His situations are always capital, and his characters are without exception real living beings, only very slightly caricatured. To be sure they are rather too sharp and clever as a class, for we seldom or never meet in society such a perfect galaxy of smart, keen-witted people, Mrs. Malaprop not excepted; but the secret of Sheridan lies below dialogue and character. It lies, I think, in the natural sympathy felt by all mixed audiences in favor of youth and high spirits, through all their pranks, as exemplified in Captain Absolute, Charles Surface, Lydia Languish, and Lady Teazle, against respectability, honest or the reverse, embodied in Sir Anthony Absolute, Sir Peter Teazle, and Joseph Surface. It is the protest of honest animal spirits against conventionality, ending in the reconciliation of the rebels to society. Some people talk of the bad moral of the "School for Scandal," never thinking that it is identical in spirit with that of the parable of the Prodigal Son. A broad feeling of charity and toleration for honest error, with a grimly sarcastic treatment of all shams, pervade Sheridan's work just as they do those of all the great satirists, whether novelists or dramatists. Goldsmith, Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, all run in the same track when they once get started, and we must confess that they have pretty high authority for their kindness toward the returning prodigal and their sneers at his eminently respectable brother, Joseph Surface, Esq. This secret of Sheridan in the "School for Scandal" is the main element of only one modern drama that I now remember--"Rip Van Winkle"--but it is quite common in the "old comedies," as they are called. These old comedies generally make their appearance at least once in two years at such theatres as Wallack's and Daly's of New York and the Arch Street at Philadelphia. I forget the name of the Boston "legitimate" place. When well acted they always "take," and there are so many stage traditions of how to act them that they are seldom badly done. The forgiveness of repentant prodigals, it will be remembered, forms the basis of most of them, an element which has gradually disappeared from the modern drama in deference to the increasing Philistine element, represented by the Y.M.C.A. and the T.A.B.