faithfully and some of them _con amore_, would I have chosen any of them; yet it is by them my ability as a playwright has been tested: while my own plays, "Godfrida," "Self's the Man," "The Knight of the Maypole," and an unpublished Arthurian play remain unproduced. The dismay of it is this:--That my Testaments and Tragedies--the matter wherewith I propose to change the mood of the world--remain, those that are issued, unknown; and those that should be written, unwritten: whereas the successful production of my four plays, the likeliest poetical plays written for the English stage in these times, would have placed me in an independent and dominant position from which all my writings could have come with that adventitious authority the world is powerless to disregard. After the playgoing public had failed to appreciate an adaptation of mine, despite Mr. Lewis Waller's greatness in the part he played, and an adorable queen of Mrs. Patrick Campbell's, I discovered, upon various attempts, appeals, and challenges, that the stage would be well pleased to do without me in the meantime, and under these auspices, which I took to be the true evolutionary determinant, I began upon my own tragedies and wrote "The Theatrocrat: a Tragic Play of Church and Stage." This play derives its title from the rank and vocation of the protagonist, Sir Tristram Sumner, proprietor and manager of the Grosvenor Theatre. The meaning of the title will best appear in Sir Tristram's own words addressed to his friend and patron, the Bishop of St. James's. "I," says Sir Tristram, "Became at last an artist: think of it! I found myself the master of the mood, Enchanting folk and playing on their nerves As though an audience were a zither; made A name far-sounding; and, by your good will, Am now--Heaven save the mark! the banal end!-- Am now Sir Tristram Sumner, nominal, As well as actual, theatrocrat;" and the significance of the sub-title will come home to the reader in the following extract from the diatribe of an exasperated actor addressed to Sir Tristram himself:-- "When plays were damned By churchmen, and the player a citizen Of rascaldom on sufferance living only, Great was the stage ... When the monarch set The lethal signet on the theatre Of gross respectability, knighting you, Sir Tristram, and other players unfortunate, Ranking you in the state with grocers, brewers, Distillers, lawyers, vicars, aldermen, He dealt a double blow at church and stage, And both are bleeding from the wound."