effect, and the "Manchester School," faced with the same difficulty, has solved it in the same way, hoping, though without much confidence, that the Lancashire cadences it adopted and used in its very few dialect plays may sound to alien ears as aptly as the language of Synge's Irish sounds to our own. Though you may search in vain the dialogue of Mr. Allan Monkhouse's plays for local characteristics, the "Manchester School" has as a rule indicated by the use, in greater or less degree, of local idioms that the speech of Lancashire has a well-marked individuality; but dialect, as a distinctive variant of the national language, can hardly be said to exist in Lancashire. One labours the point a little in order to make clear that the "Manchester School" had no accidental advantage, over writers who lived near other provincial Repertory Theatres, in the existence of a language whose dramatic literature they felt urged to create; there was no such language. And its absence makes a curiosity of the fact that from Manchester alone of the Repertory centres has any considerable body of local drama emerged. (Dublin is another matter; one speaks here of Great Britain.) Other Repertory centres, like Birmingham and Bristol, must have local characteristics: Liverpool is, geographically at any rate, in Lancashire; and Glasgow has a language of its own. None of these Repertories was sterile, but even Birmingham, despite Mr. John Drinkwater and "Abraham Lincoln," was economical in creativeness and fathered no local drama. Must the conclusion be that the Manchester atmosphere has, with its soot, a vitalizing dramatic principle?