In drama, whether prose or verse, the device has frequently been used of bringing back to our material world the spirits of persons who have passed out of mortal life, and causing them to pervade the scenes with which they were associated in the body. That device is employed in Belasco’s “The Return of Peter Grimm,” in which David Warfield made his first and, thus far, his only approach to the realm of Imagination [since this passage was written Warfield has appeared, 1915-’16, as _Van Der Decken_, in a drama by Belasco on the subject of “The Flying Dutchman.”--J. W.]. _Peter Grimm_, a prosperous, self-willed, kind, good old man, who in the government of his family and the arrangement of his worldly affairs has made serious errors,--the most deplorable of them being the separation of his ward, a docile, affectionate girl named _Kathrien_, from a youth who loves her and whom she loves, and her betrothal to his nephew, _Frederik Grimm_, a hypocrite and a scoundrel,--is suddenly stricken dead, of heart disease, and, after a little time his spirit returns to the place which was his earthly home, intent on retrieving those errors, discomfiting the rascal by whom he has been deceived, and making his foster-child happy. Warfield, personating _Peter Grimm_, first presented him as a mortal, afterward as a spirit. The character,--honest, sturdy, opinionated, worldly-wise, somewhat rough and imperious, yet intrinsically genial,--was correctly assumed and expressed, but the actor’s denotement of spiritual being was neither [Illustration: REINA BELASCO. MRS. MORRIS GEST Photograph by White. Belasco Collection. ] imaginative nor sympathetic, and it did not create even the slightest illusion.