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One, or the King's Visit," Wallack's Theatre, December 6, 1854; "First Impressions," Wallack's Theatre, September 17, 1856; "The Veteran, or France and Algeria," Wallack's Theatre, January 17, 1859; "Central Park," Wallack's Theatre, November 12, 1862; and "Rosedale," Wallack's Theatre, September 30, 1863. The first two are based on the fascinating and long famous romances of Alexandre Dumas; Lester acted D'Artagnan. In "Two to One" he acted De Rameau. There are plays of earlier date than those of Wallack entitled "First Impressions" and "Fortune of War," the former presented at the old Park Theatre, September 23, 1815, the latter at the Anthony Street Theatre, November 18, 1820. I do not know that Lester was indebted to either of them. "Central Park" is, to some extent, a variant of Arthur Murphy's comedy of "All in the Wrong,"-produced June 15, 1761, at Drury Lane Theatre, which had been hired for a summer season by Arthur Murphy and Samuel Foote, and that play is a variant of Molière's "Cocu Imaginaire." "The Veteran"

was based on a story called "Frank Hilton, or the Queen's Own," by James Grant. The elder Wallack acted in it, as Col. Delmar, the veteran, -the last part he ever studied, and Lester acted Leon Delmar, the veteran's son: a fine and effective combination. John Brougham, in that play gave an exceedingly humorous performance, as Oflan Agan, an Irishman who has become a potent Mahometan official. "Rosedale," in which Lester gained great popularity, as Eliot Grey, was founded on a novel called "Lady Lee's Widowhood," by Capt. Sir Edward Bruce Hamley (1824-1893), originally published in "Blackwood's Magazine." Captain Hamley served as an officer in the British Army, during the Crimean War, and the novel is said to have been written in the trenches, before Sebastopol.

"ROSEDALE" AND FITZ-JAMES O'BRIEN.

The actual authorship of "Rosedale" has been much, and unjustly, questioned. In that elaborate compilation of memoranda, by T. Alston Brown, contributive to a "History of the New

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York Stage" (1903), Volume II., page 252, the following statement appears:

"The author of 'Rosedale' was not Lester Wallack, as the play-bills always said. At a dinner given in this city in 1890 it was stated by Charles Gayler that Fitz-James O'Brien (who was killed in the War of the Rebellion) was paid $100 by Lester Wallack to write it. For a quarter of a century Lester Wallack was credited with the authorship of that drama. As a matter of fact, neither of these gentlemen wrote it. It is a close dramatization of the novel 'Lady Lee's Widowhood,' which appeared in 'Blackwood's Magazine.' Even the names of the characters are retained."

Brown's aspersion of Wallack, which is not warranted, has recently been circulated anew by the esteemed theatrical antiquarian John Bouvé Clapp, of Boston, who, in an article in "The Transcript" of that city, ascribed the authorship of the novel on which it is founded to Miss Braddon (Mrs. John Maxwell), and added the erroneous statement that O'Brien left "a volume or two of prose or verse."