That, surely, is the significance of the "Manchester School," that the phenomenon and the hope. Miss Horniman established her Company in Manchester, with Mr. B. Iden Payne, a genius, as her producer of plays. What she gave to Manchester was perhaps more, perhaps not more, than the aftermath of the historic Vedrenne-Barker campaign at the Court Theatre; at any rate, she gave a series of Repertory plays--plays which had no likelihood of being seen in the provinces under the touring system--notably well acted; she demonstrated that drama was a living art, and in the light of that demonstration there outcropped spontaneously, un-self-consciously, the body of local drama now known as the "Manchester School." Whatever the individual merits of the Lancashire plays may be, whatever, even, their collective importance or unimportance, they have this significance of localization. Stimulated by Miss Horniman's catholic repertoire, local authors sought to express in drama local characteristics. There are no two questions in the writer's mind, nor, he thinks, in anybody's, as to whether local drama is or is not a good thing. It is more than ever good in to-day's special London conditions, but it was always good in and for its own locality, and very good when it broke away from home, travelled to London and introduced to Londoners authentic representations of natives of their country. It brought variety where variety was needed. Not all the plays of the "Manchester School," of course, have travelled. One or two, indeed, hardly travelled across the Gaiety Theatre footlights, and in the case of a few others, mostly one-act plays, there was never the least chance of their emerging from Lancashire owing to the fact that they were written deliberately in dialect. A most racy little piece, "Complaints," by Mr. Ernest Hutchinson, with its scene laid in the office of an Oldham spinning-mill, is a case in point. One doubts, even, if the comparatively urbane Manchester audience grasped the whole of its idiomatic dialogue. But these are the extremes of local drama, and generally, the Lancashire writers have avoided dialect as, in the first place, impracticable, and in the second place, disused, except (to quote Houghton) "amongst the roughest class in the most out-of-the way districts." Accent is not dialect though possibly originates in it. Even when one wishes to use dialect one must not, for stage purposes, write it as it is spoken. The dramatist selects his material from dialect as he selects his larger material from life. Dramatically correct dialect is literally incorrect; it is highly selected dialogue which indicates, but does not obscure, and the true dialect dramatist is not the man who exactly imitates the speech of a district, but he who most skilfully adapts its rhythms and picks out its salient words. Synge invented an Irish dialect which is false in detail and infinitely true in broad