To come back to the windfalls of the "Manchester School" printed here. They fell, one of them in the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, at a time when Miss Horniman's Company was on vacation; another at the Liverpool Repertory Theatre, which was in origin a secession from Manchester headed by the late Miss Darragh, with the plays produced by Mr. Basil Dean, later the first Liverpool Director; and the third so far away from Manchester as the Empire Theatre, Syracuse, New York State, linked with Manchester, for all that, through being produced by Mr. Iden Payne. In reading them again, one is startled for the thousandth time by the difference between stage and study. The third act of "The Northerners" makes curious reading, because it depends partly upon the juxtaposition of the characters on the stage, partly upon the suggestion "off" of a ruse plagiarized from the Punic Wars, partly upon a spectacular "curtain," but it is--production proved it--in the focus of the theatre. It "came off" on the stage. Laughter in the theatre is, again, a mystery. It is possible that the Lancashire plays in general have the characteristic of acting more amusingly than they read. "Hindle Wakes" reads positively austerely; acted, it is full of humour; and one's recollections of "The Game" on the stage make for the same conclusion. It has, in the theatre, a far more pronounced tendency to set its audience laughing than seems apparent in its text. In the case of "Zack" the funis, one would say, hardly of a subtle kind. Taking the "Manchester School," bye and large, and remembering the charge against it that it was "grey" or "dreary," one is forced to believe either that Lancashire humour is not everybody's humour--Mrs. Metherell in "The Game" might almost be set as a test--or else that the "Manchester School" has been confused with the whole body of Miss Horniman's productions; and, even if so, the charge fails. There was an Icelandic tragedy produced in the early days of her Company, which depressed the thermometer alarmingly; there was Verhaeren's "The Cloister," a great play performed to empty houses, adding insult to injury by being popularly called "dreary," and the chill resulting from those two productions, one a mistake of management, the other a mistake of the public, lasted for years. The case of the Lancashire Plays is clear; their authors aimed at presenting the human comedy of Lancashire, and if their dramatic purpose was to be achieved by the alternative uses of laughter or of tears, they preferred to achieve it by the ruthless light of laughter. Many of the plays have not been printed and the appended bibliography includes no examples of the comedy of Mr. H. M. Richardson, Dr. F. E. Wynne or Mr. M. A. Arabian. Incomplete record of the Lancashire Plays as it is, it serves to drive home the contention that the "Manchester School" are, in the main, comic writers. Bibliography: