scene, was introduced (the device of Mackaye), on a plan somewhat similar to that which had been successfully adopted ten years earlier by Edwin Booth, at Booth’s Theatre; a strong dramatic company was organized, and on February 4, 1880, the house was opened, with a drama by Mackaye, called “Hazel Kirke,” a rehash of an earlier play by him, called “An Iron Will,” which, in turn, had been adapted from a French drama. “Hazel Kirke” met with extraordinary success, chiefly because of the superb impersonation of its central character, _Dunstan Kirke_, by Charles Walter Couldock (1815-1898). It was acted 486 consecutive times, at the Madison Square, and subsequently it was performed all over the country. Couldock withdrew from the cast, temporarily, after the 200th performance in New York, and Mackaye succeeded him. The run of “Hazel Kirke” at the Madison Square terminated on May 31, 1881, and on June 1 it was succeeded by William Gillette’s farce of “The Professor,” which held the stage till October 29, following, when it gave place to a play called “Esmeralda,” by Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, which had 350 performances. Meanwhile Mackaye had become dissatisfied with his position and had determined to withdraw from it. His contract with the Mallorys, as he told me at that time (for I knew him well and he often talked with me about his affairs), had been heedlessly made and largely to his disadvantage. Contract or no contract, Mackaye and the Mallorys could not have long remained in association on amicable terms, because they were as antagonistic as fire and water. Mackaye was a wayward genius, of poetic temperament, wildly enthusiastic, impetuous, capricious, volatile, prone to extravagant fancies and bold experiments, and completely unsympathetic with regulative, Sunday-school morality. The Mallorys, on the contrary, were shrewd, practical business men, in no way visionary, thoroughly conventional in character,--in fact, moral missionaries, intent on making the Theatre a sort of auxiliary to the Church, their whole scheme of theatrical management being, originally, to profit by the patronage of the Christian public. Some persons, like some things, are incompatible. Mackaye resigned and withdrew while “Esmeralda” was still current, and thus the office was left vacant to which David Belasco succeeded. BELASCO AT THE MADISON SQUARE.