known. It is extremely difficult for modern taste to discover in what the greatness of Douglas consisted.

The great successes achieved by the Booths, the Garricks, and the Kembles were in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher. But what garbled versions they were of those great writers, more especially of Shakespeare. Every dramatic manipulator, from Dryden and Davenant to Nahum Tate and Theophilus Cibber, thought he could improve upon "the sweet Swan of Avon"; the consequence was that not a single play of his was given without impertinent interpolations and monstrous alterations, amounting in some to an absolute change of plot and motive. Indeed, it is only within the memory of the present generation that Garrick's version of Romeo and Juliet and Cibber's Richard III. have given place to Shakespeare's; and Macready first restored the Fool to King Lear.

A comparison between the dramatic literature of the first three decades and the last seventy years of the eighteenth century is startling in its contrast. Wycherley, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Farquhar, Cibber, Steele were all plying their pens during the first period, and such a galaxy of comedy writers producing in the same era has no parallel in our own or in any other history. The great work of the second period is The School for Scandal; but fine as is the wit of Sheridan, Congreve's is finer, and were it not for the screen scene, which is probably the finest situation in the whole range of comedy, the work would be little more than a clever plagiary upon "Tom Jones," Wycherley's Plain Dealer, and Molière's Le Misanthrope. The Rivals, previously produced at Covent Garden, was damned on the first night, January 17th, 1775. Sheridan held it was through the incompetence of the actor who personated Sir Lucius. Yet it

was finely cast, with Shuter, Woodward, Lewis, and Quick in the principal parts. Certain alterations, however, being made, the first night's judgment was speedily reversed by contemporaries, as it has been by posterity.

A few comedies that preceded Sheridan's great works must not go unmentioned. Colman the elder's Jealous Wife (1761), and The Clandestine Marriage (1766), an admirable work; Arthur Murphy's The Way to keep Him (1760), and All in the Wrong (1761), two spirited comedies; and above all, Goldsmith's delightful She Stoops to Conquer, given to Covent Garden in 1773. A reference to this work renders necessary some account of the school of comedy it was destined to displace.

A new species of comedy called the sentimental had become the fashion during the first half of the eighteenth century. Steele's three comedies, The Tender Husband (1703), The Lying Lover (1704), and The Conscious Lovers (1721), were the earliest specimens of this form of composition; but they found no imitators until Hugh Kelly produced his False Delicacy (1768), which, though far from being so contemptible a piece of work as many critics have represented it to be, is overcharged with superfine writing. Cumberland followed in Kelly's steps with melodramatic additions, while in the hands of Holcroft and Mrs. Inchbald the style degenerated into the domestic drama of the last century. So great was the success of False Delicacy that it ran eight successive nights, and would have gone longer, but Garrick had pledged himself to the public that no new piece should run beyond that limit. It was, however, performed twenty times afterwards during the season.

The comedies of Colman the younger were popular not only in their day, but certain of them, such as John Bull, The Poor Gentleman-both written for Covent

Garden and The Heir at Law (for the Haymarket) were favourites within these five-and-twenty years. They were essentially of the sentimental school, stilted in the serious scenes, and though humorous, almost destitute of wit. Nevertheless these plays are remarkable, as, in conjunction with those of Holcroft, Cumberland, and Mrs. Inchbald, they mark a new era in stage literature ; hitherto kings and nobles only had filled the tragic scene, and the beaux and belles the comic, but the authors just named, infected by the spirit of the French Revolution, chose most of their heroes and heroines from among the people, and their comic characters from a class that is almost entirely absent from the works of Congreve and even Sheridan. Colman was the creator of that terrible bore, the virtuous peasant, who always carried his entire wardrobe in a coloured pocket-handkerchief at the end of a stick, who was always fighting in defence of the hapless village maiden, eternally spouting platitudes, was as eager as the stage sailor to bestow his last shilling upon anyone in want, and always expressed joy by stamping about and singing "Ri fol, riddi iddi ido," a conventional figure that was driven from the stage by the burlesques of H. J. Byron. One of the most notable of Colman's pieces was the once famous Mountaineers, written for Covent Garden (1793); the mad lover, Octavian, was a favourite part with Kemble, Kean, Elliston, and many of their successors; indeed, the last words that Edmund Kean ever uttered were from the dying speech of Octavian, "Farewell, Flo-Floranthe.'

Mrs. Inchbald was one of the dramatic luminaries of the Bow Street house during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, but no audience could now endure any one of her works. Yet Such Things Are, a most wretched agglomeration of twaddle, nightly crowded the

theatre to the ceiling; hundreds were turned away from the doors, and the lucky authoress realised £900 by it. Wives as they Were and Maids as they Are, Lovers' Vows, Everyone has his Fault, kept the stage for many years; but the sentiment is mawkish and overstrained, the comic scenes, though occasionally sprightly, cannot boast of much wit, while the characters are of the most conventional type. Mrs. Cowley's bright comedy, The Belle's Stratagem (1780), which was given a new lease of life by Irving's and Ellen Terry's admirable acting, and most of Holcroft's works, including the only one of his that has kept the stage, The Road to Ruin (1792), were produced at Covent Garden. Several of Cumberland's plays first saw the footlights at that house, but his best-known works were given to Drury Lane; notably, The Wheel of Fortune (1795), which, in the misanthrope Penruddock, furnished John Kemble with one of his finest impersonations; a few will remember Samuel Phelps's admirable rendering of this part.

A dramatic novelty that originated in the second half of the eighteenth century was the musical farce and operatic drama, for although The Beggar's Opera was the progenitor of all, it did not find imitators for many years. Of these musical pieces, Charles Dibdin's Quaker, The Padlock, The Waterman, and Isaac Bickerstaff's delicious Love in a Village, with its charming comedy and delightful airs, and his Lionel and Clarissa, now quite forgotten, may be taken as types. These and others in the same style, Inkle and Yarico, Rosina, No Song no Supper, The Miller and his Men, etc., etc., with music by some of our best composers, were among the most popular of English dramatic entertainments.

During the nineteenth century, the great theatres added little to the literature of the country. Such as it

is, Covent Garden had the lion's share. Here were produced some of Morton's best works: Town and Country, in which the character of Plastic may claim to be the first of that long series of gentlemanly villains, of which Captain Hawkesly in Still Waters Run Deep is the most pronounced development; The School of Reform, in which the elder Emery played so magnificently as Tyke; and Speed the Plough, performed not so many years ago, were among the number. For this house O'Keefe wrote his Wild Oats, George Colman the younger The Poor Gentleman (1800) and John Bull (1803), with Fawcett as Job Thornberry; Cooke, Peregrine; Blanchard, Sir Simon; Lewis, Tom Shuffleton ; Johnstone, Dennis; Emery, Dan.

In tragedy, Shiel's Evadne and The Apostate, which, though containing passages of real poetry, owed their success almost entirely to the grand acting of Miss O'Neill, Charles Young, and Macready, are the only tragic productions that need be mentioned previous to the rise of Sheridan Knowles. Virginius, the first of Knowles's plays produced in London, was brought out at Covent Garden, on May 17th, 1820; the title rôle was probably Macready's grandest effort, and the tragedy was received with the greatest enthusiasm.

Knowles was hailed as a Shakespeare Redivivus, and it must be admitted that to an audience surfeited with the sham classicism of such plays as Ambrose Phillips's Distressed Mother, which even Macready had selected to make his London début in, there was a reality of flesh and blood about the new writer's treatment of the pathetic old Roman story, marvellously refreshing. Virginius is a powerful play with fine dramatic situations, and, well acted, must always command the tears and sympathies of the spectators; but we have only