comedy, the success of "The Stranger" is easily understood. It has the theatrical merit of arousing curiosity at the beginning and keeping it on question until the last moment; and it deals, over-sentimentally of course, with a social question of dramatic value and of especial piquancy at a time when many conventions seemed tottering,--should an erring wife be taken back again by her husband? The theme of "A Woman Killed with Kindness," "Jane Shore," and "The Fair Penitent" was given a new interest and a new solution. "Pizarro," retaining much of the plot familiar in English tragedy since the time of Dryden's "Indian Emperor," has two lovers, opponents in war, and two heroines, one vengeful, the other angelic, but makes the real hero the renouncing lover, who sacrifices all for the happiness of the angel who loves not him but his friend. Under these new auspices the fair penitent and the renunciatory hero began long careers in English drama and fiction. But neither these nor any other of Kotzebue's plays offered any guidance toward a serious interpretation of life or any innovations of real consequence in the English tragic tradition. If Kotzebue's plays offered little promise for the national drama, the native plays which rivaled them in popularity offered less. Castles, monks, dungeons, and so on had already become somewhat common in musical plays and operas[45] and occasionally in tragedies, when "The Castle Spectre" of Monk Lewis opened the flood-gates to "tales of terror" and their medieval and supernatural paraphernalia. "The Castle Spectre," which in the season of 1797-98 surpassed "The Stranger" and for a while held its own with Kotzebue, represents a new reign of romance. The new queen did not come from "perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." She belonged to the earlier days of the romantic movement, and made her conquest at the head of squadrons of medievalistic, terroristic, and Germanistic Goths. She is adequately described in the prologue to the play:-- "Far from the haunts of men, of vice the foe, The moon-struck child of genius and of woe, Versed in each magic spell, and dear to fame, A fair enchantress dwells, Romance her name, She loathes the sun or blazing taper's light: The moon-beam'd landscape and tempestuous night Alone she loves; and oft, with glimmering lamp, Near graves new-opened, or midst dungeons damp, Drear forests, ruin'd aisles, and haunted towers, Forlorn she roves, and raves away the hours! Anon, when storms howl loud and lash the deep, Desperate she climbs the sea-rock's beetling steep; There wildly strikes her harp's fantastic strings, Tells to the moon how grief her bosom wrings, And while her strange song chaunts fictitious ills, In wounded hearts Oblivion's balm distils."