It may truthfully be said that Mrs. Barry created Otway, both as dramatist and poet; for _The Orphan_ and _Venice Preserved_, the two most pathetic plays in English, would never have been written but for her. It is often thus within the power of an actor to create a dramatist; and his surest means of immortality is to inspire the composition of plays which may survive his own demise. After Duse is dead, poets may read _La Città Morta_, and imagine her. The memory of Coquelin is, in this way, likely to live longer than that of Talma. We can merely guess at Talma's art, because the plays in which he acted are unreadable to-day. But if M. Rostand's _Cyrano_ is read a hundred years from now, it will be possible for students of it to imagine in detail the salient features of the art of Coquelin. It will be evident to them that the actor made love luringly and died effectively, that he was capable of lyric reading and staccato gasconade, that he had a burly humor and that touch of sentiment that trembles into tears. Similarly we know to-day, from the fact that Shakespeare played the Ghost in _Hamlet_, that he must have had a voice that was full and resonant and deep. So from reading the plays of Molière we can imagine the robust figure of Magdeleine Béjart, the grace of La Grange, the pretty petulance of the flighty fair Armande. Some sense of this must have been in the mind of Sir Henry Irving when he strove industriously to create a dramatist who might survive him and immortalise his memory. The facile, uncreative Wills was granted many chances, and in _Charles I_ lost an opportunity to make a lasting drama. Lord Tennyson came near the mark in _Becket_; but this play, like those of Wills, has not proved sturdy enough to survive the actor who inspired it. For all his striving, Sir Henry left no dramatist as a monument to his art. IV STAGE CONVENTIONS IN MODERN TIMES I In 1581 Sir Philip Sidney praised the tragedy of _Gorboduc_, which he had seen acted by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, because it was "full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases." A few years later the young poet, Christopher Marlowe, promised the audience of his initial tragedy that they should "hear the Scythian Tamburlaine threatening the world with high astounding terms." These two statements are indicative of the tenor of Elizabethan plays. _Gorboduc_, to be sure, was a ponderous piece, made according to the pseudo-classical fashion that soon went out of favor; while _Tamburlaine the Great_ was triumphant with the drums and tramplings of romance. The two plays were diametrically opposed in method; but they had this in common: each was full of stately speeches and of high astounding terms. Nearly a century later, in 1670, John Dryden added to the second part of his _Conquest of Granada_ an epilogue in which he criticised adversely the dramatists of the elder age. Speaking of Ben Jonson and his contemporaries, he said: