As nobody has ever succeeded, or is likely to succeed, in really dramatizing a novel, it is not surprising that the stage version of "Trilby" should prove in some respects unsatisfactory. It might be thought that the book would lend itself readily to dramatic treatment; but a little consideration will show that it offers peculiar difficulties to the playwright, inasmuch as its chief charm is one of manner, which cannot be transferred to the stage, while its story, although it contains some striking situations, such as Trilby's collapse upon the death of Svengali, consists chiefly of a series of episodes, largely independent of each other and strung together very loosely. All things considered, Mr. Potter ought not, perhaps, to be held to too strict an account for the liberties he has taken with the text and some of the personages, but he has certainly lowered the tone of the work, and been guilty of various crudities of construction. There is some excuse for his employment of Svengali as the evil influence which wrecks the happiness of Little Billee and Trilby, but he leaves nothing of the author's original intention, and infinitely belittles the character of the girl, when he attributes her flight from her lover to mesmeric suggestion, instead of her own noble and unselfish devotion. In many other similar ways the spiritual side of the book suffers at his hands. His persistent references to Trilby's posing for the figure, his selection of that particular incident for her first introduction, and the joking references to it which he puts into the mouths of other personages, are in bad taste, while his travesty of the character of Dr. Bagot is entirely without justification. Mrs. Bagot he treats with more consideration, but he reduces her to the level of the dullest stage conventionality. Trilby herself preserves a good many of her characteristics, but is degraded even more than in the book by her subserviency to Svengali.