narrow benches, cramped knees, the atmosphere of carbonic acid, the glare and smell of gas, the heat of a private box, the draughts of an open lobby,-answer the question. Even in the arrangement of the night's entertainments there is a total want of intelligent consideration for public convenience. The performances are almost without exception so long as to weary; they begin at an hour which clashes with the present dinner-time; and they close at an hour which cuts into the sleep of all hard-working people,—and who nowadays is not hard-working?

Some slight improvement on these points is here and there visible; but even the managers who have done most to remedy these discomforts have stopped half-way. It is difficult, we are convinced, to estimate how much increase of attraction might be obtained by abolishing the box-office shilling, the box-keepers' fee for a seat or a bill, the intrusions of the saloon-keeper with her weak tea and floury ices, by ventilating the theatre, making the seats comfortable, beginning half an hour later, playing a short lever de rideau before the principal piece of the evening, and diminishing the length of the night's amusements. In this point,

again, the manager of the Olympic has shown more sense than his brethren; but even he has rather begun than completed the improvements still to be desiderated before the theatre can be visited with an enjoyment unmarred by a hasty dinner, and the accumulated annoyance of attempted imposition, an uncomfortable seat, a pestilential atmosphere, worn-out eyes, and a racking headache.

From managers we pass to authors.

We have said that in the days of Elizabeth the stage was the only field for the representation of life through fiction. It was also the readiest and easiest, if not the only, way of making money by the pen. Hence the rush of young wits with their books to the "sharers of the Blackfriars," or 66 the Fortune." The profession of authorship then was, in nineteen cases out of twenty, the profession of dramatic authorship.

In the years immediately following the Restoration, the character of dramatic authorship underwent a marked change. The stage was devoted to the reflection of gay life about town. Its poetic plays were either those of a preceding generation, or the rhyming productions of Dryden and Lee. Otway alone, a little later than these, caught a Shakespearian echo; but the theatre of the Restoration was essentially a comic stage. Puritan sourness had driven gravity out of fashion; and society, so long compelled to be straight-laced, took to going stark-naked. The court gave the cue, and the city either shook its head and stood aloof, or flung up its cap and followed.

The theatre was no resort for the graver or decenter sort.

It attracted smug precisians, like Pepys, who delighted in dabbling about the edges of dirt, and who snatched a fearful joy among the bona robas of the side-galleries. But such rogues could impose no restraint on actors or writers. The court furnished playwrights, as the ranks of the old cavalier army supplied players. Such actors as Hart and Mohun, Goodman and Kynaston, were spirits congenial with such authors as Etherege, Sedley, and Wycherley, and must have spoken their rattling and reckless dialogue with the unction of genuine sympathy. No period is so well represented in its comedy as that of Charles II. It borrowed from the French; but the manners of the court were French. Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, prolonged the profligacy and wit of the merry monarch's day through the graver reigns of William and Anne and the first and second Georges. By that time society had grown decenter than the theatre, though still coarse to a degree incredible to us. From the accession of George III. the stage has been growing every year less a reflection of manners; only Foote, for a time, made it an Aristophanic mirror of society. Richardson tried to do so, but merely provoked a licensing bill. Sheridan could dish up Vanbrugh for audiences who had passed away altogether from the manners of Vanbrugh's day; and when German sentiment was engrafted on our oldcomedy stock, a fruit was produced altogether strange and unlike any thing in our household gardens. The plays of Colman, Morton, and Reynolds, represent only fragments of manners, and reflect no real life or character whatever.

The authors of our own time, succeeding to a legacy of stubborn fathers, testy uncles, wild young bloods, smart servants, flighty wards, and frumpish old maids, have added a profusion of French spices to the dramatic ragoût, so as to render the dish more thoroughly un-English. Meanwhile, from the roots of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, the novel, and from the novel the historical romance, has grown up; a new mode of representing life is laid open to minds with the fiction-fever upon them. To get to this field for the labour of the pen, there is no frowsy and repulsive theatrical waiting-room to pass through, no manager to propitiate, no touchy and vain-glorious actors to consult and measure and fit with parts, no visible public to face. The novel-reader is saved from the necessity of hissing; he can yawn and skip what bores him; he can close the book at the point of weariness, at which in the theatre he must damn. Then the huge and spreading newspaper-press is a product of our times. It brings in the quickest returns for pen-work, and demands least continuous labour. Journalism and reviewing will keep many a briefless barrister, vagrant-minded clerk, or clever man about town, who in Shakespeare's day, if he would write at all

for money, must have taken to write for the stage. The number of those who live by dramatic authorship is small. The plays of the Dramatic Authors' Society, in the list before us, are divided among some sixty writers; but with a large proportion of the sixty dramatic authorship is either an occasional resource, or an amusement of leisure hours. There are probably not more than twenty persons in England at this time permanently supporting themselves by dramatic authorship. The general practice of translation has lowered the standard of such authorship. A little stage-tact, a little readiness of words, a French dictionary, and a credit at Jeff's foreign book-shop, make many a dramatic author. If access to the theatre were easier and pleasanter, there would be more than there are of such authors: but there are enough, in all conscience. Such dramatic authors work mischief in many ways. They lower the standard of the craft, and deprive the few producers of original pieces of credit with the public and of influence in the theatre; they cut down the market-price of pieces; they supply an unwholesome and unnatural diet to audiences. The International Copyright Act with France has done nothing effectual to check the practice of stealing from the French. That act excepts adaptations from the conditions under which it lays translations. Now, all pieces transferred to our stage from the French may be called "adaptations." We are not aware of a single instance in which a French author has derived any profit under this act, nor do we believe it has hindered the translation of a single French piece. As dramatic authors are, it is little wonder they should command small consideration from managers, small respect from actors, small admiration from the public. The theatre in their hands is becoming more and more the resort of those only who seek to laugh, and are not very fastidious about the source of their laughter; nor will the evil be diminished till some theatre has established itself with a manager who shows a marked preference for original pieces. No manager can do this till original pieces are written calculated to attract audiences. To write such pieces, authors must study the life about them, and present the public with pictures of which they can recognise the truth and read the lessons. Authors must shake themselves out of two centuries of convention, and go back to reality in dramatic story and in stage representation, as the pre-Raphaelites have gone back to nature in painting. When dramatic authors do this, there will be hope for the theatre; but not till then. The task of those who attempt such a work will not be easy. Our life has parted with its most salient dramatic features. We have grown undemonstrative in manner, uniform in dress, decorous, and studiously commonplace of speech. But the great essential elements of dramatic

effect are still working under the surface of our society. The exhibition of them would be all the more piquant for the contrast between their great forces and the thin veneer of decorum with which we have overlaid them. We cannot believe that such an impregnation of our theatre with reality is impossible; and feeling the earnestness which marks our time, amidst all the shows, shams, and snobisms which run rampant about us, we will not look upon it as improbable.

We can afford no more space to stage-authors; the actors and the public remain to be considered. What actors are depends mainly upon managers and authors. Were the theatre worthier, it would no longer remain the profession of those who have no other. At present the feeding springs of the actors' calling are vanity and necessity. There may be something inherent in the employment which determines this; no profession, perhaps, which aims at amusing only can ever be conventionally respectable. The popular association of theatrical life with laxity and indecorum, no doubt militates strongly against the prospect of ever recruiting the stage from the same classes and styles of men as those found among the more honoured professions and the less discredited arts. The large number of our theatres, at all of which all kinds of plays are represented from time to time, has lowered the standard of excellence among our actors. We have nothing like a school now in the country theatres. The stages of the capital are no longer places for the display of excellence slowly matured at Bath or Norwich, Edinburgh or Dublin. England, thanks to railways, has become an extended London.

The poetic drama for the time being is extinct upon our stage. Macready was its last support. It is true that by aid of elaborate antiquarianism and material splendour those plays of Shakespeare that furnish a peg on which to hang fine clothes and magnificent pageantry still find overflowing audiences at the Princess's; and in remote Islington the unwearied manager of Sadler's Wells can still draw together to the Elizabethan plays unsophisticated crowds, who represent probably a state of cultivation and a power of appreciative enjoyment more resembling those of the population which filled the Blackfriars or the Globe when Shakespeare first gave his plays to the world than any other part of the London public. But apart from these exceptions, we are forced to the conclusion that our stage is becoming essentially a comic and domestic one. The good actors we have-and their names happily are not few—excel in these walks of the drama. But they barely leaven the lump of conceit, bad-breeding, imperfect utterance, and ungainly action that make up our body of average actors. Here again our hope of improvement must be in the combined influence

of managers, authors, and the public,—above all, of that portion of it which speaks with "voice potential" in newspaper criticism.

We are no praisers of past times-no thick-and-thin believers in the plays or the players of our fathers' and grandfathers' days. Excepting from our censure great actors and actresses in comedy and tragedy,-of whose genius it would be affectation to express a doubt,-study of the plays, the contemporary criticisms, the theatrical biographies, and the theatrical portraits of the last generation inclines us to the opinion that the style of serious acting, between the days of Colley Cibber and those of Edmund Kean, was stiff in action and over-emphatic in elocution; at once monotonous and stilted, devoid of truth to nature, yet not attaining to ideal grace; and that the comic acting had corresponding faults of exaggeration and over-colouring. But, at any rate, the

old school had their art, such as it was; and their elaboration, however overdone. With Edmund Kean came in the natural school of tragic acting. The change which he inaugurated was inevitable. It did not reach our stage till it had transformed our manners of everyday life. But such an actor as Kean could leave to his brother-actors no legacy except a direction to the school in which he had studied-that of nature. To actors who would not resort to that school he could bequeath nothing but his tricks and peculiarities. The common herd of players, to whom the school of nature is for ever barred, in the absence of a formal art of the stage can but stumble on blindly, with no reliable guidance whatever. All that can be done for them by managers or authors is, to warn them against glaring violations of truth and propriety by every means in their power. As for bad manners, faults of delivery, pronunciation, and grammar, arising from want of access to cultivated society and from defects of education, the manager should make it his business to correct these in his performers far more rigidly than most managers do at present. The more intelligent actors will strive to remedy such blemishes by observation and self-culture.

We have no great tragic actor at present. Macready was the last. Mrs. Charles Kean and Miss Faucit sustain the reputation of our tragic actresses. In comic actors we are still rich. Though we have lately lost Farren, Mrs. Orger, and Mrs. Glover, the names of Harley, Buckstone, the Keeleys-man and wife,Wright, and Compton, in broad comedy and farce; of Charles Mathews and Leigh Murray in light and genteel comedy; of the Wigans, Webster, Emery, Miss Woolgar, and Mrs. Stirling in a wider range, from the natural humour to the unheroic pathos of domestic life, still uphold the credit of our stage in its lighter and lower forms of personation. Mr. Robson deserves a place by himself. He is sui generis, and as yet cannot be classified,