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is of much earlier date than most persons are aware. Augustan days of Anne downwards, our play-writers have drawn largely on France; and a great proportion of what elderly playgoers fondly call "good old English farces" are translations from the French.

And yet our time can boast its original writers. To say nothing of smaller men, whose place is as yet hardly fixed, the generation which has seen produced plays of Miss Baillie, Byron, Sheil, Barry Cornwall, Milman, Miss Mitford, Knowles, Bulwer, Jerrold, White, Marston, and Browning, has something to show. It is enough for the present to say of these writers, that they have produced works which, whether regarded as plays or as poems, are superior to any thing presented on the stage, of the serious kind, since the Restoration-Otway's Venice Preserved alone excepted. In comedy we cannot say as much. Jerrold may have as much wit of words as Congreve, or Vanbrugh, or Sheridan; but he lacks their dramatic movement, buoyant spirits, and knowledge of the world as their world was.

But in spite of these and other less conspicuous exceptions, it must be admitted that our stage is of the French, Frenchy. There is a sad lack of nationality about it. Its pictures of life, such as they are, are thinly-disguised scenes, which may have likelihood in Paris, but are ludicrously unlike any thing in England. The morals are as un-English as the manners. The mainspring of French stage-intrigue, serious or comic, is infidelity to the marriage-vow. Our decencies of life forbid resort to this source of interest. But the interest our playwrights must have; and it is very amusing to see the shifts to which the translators and adapters of our theatres are put to preserve the effect, and yet varnish over the corrupt cause into something less repugnant to British propriety. But the scent of corruption still clings to the scene; and no healthiness of moral tone is possible in our theatre while the prurient poison of the modern French stage is transfused through all its veins.

But, with these evils, we have derived from the French theatre many good lessons. The modern French dramatists are, beyond question, the first who have reduced to system the secret of stageeffect. If, instead of adapting their plays, our writers had contented themselves with studying in them the art of developing a plot in and through action, the secret of conducting a story so as to keep alive the interest of an audience, and to raise it higher and higher to a culminating point, we should have owed nothing but gratitude to France. Even in translations and adaptations, however, this constructive art of the French is manifested for the education of original dramatists to come; and all who even now write original pieces show in their works the influence of French

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principles of construction. Our actors, too, have derived useful influences from France.

The natural conduct of the story of a play goes far to induce naturalness in the actors. Compare an English comedy of the modern French school with one of the school of Colman, Reynolds, or Morton, to go no further back: it will be found that the coarsely-coloured and over-emphatic style of acting at once engendered by and encouraging the exaggeration of our legitimate English comedy would be impossible, however bad the actor, with the work of the disciple of Scribe or Bayard.

But this sobering and naturalising influence of the French stage upon our own is confined to comedy. In what is called drama," France finds us in pieces, but remains without influence upon our actors. In farce, inasmuch as our borrowers depart from all probabilities of English life in their "conveyance" from the French,-the modern actor is led daily more and more away from the study of the living originals about him.

But before dealing separately with the circumstances of author, manager, actor, and public, in our own day, we must refer briefly to the number of theatres in London at different dates.

About the time that Shakespeare began to write for the stage, the population of London was not much above onetwentieth of its present numbers; yet it could maintain not fewer than eleven theatres. It is true, the largest of them were in all probability smaller than the least of our present houses, except the little box in the Strand; and that some were open only at certain seasons of the year. Rather more than a century later, Colley Cibber considered two theatres more than the town could find actors to occupy, or theatrical taste to support with profit. The period to which the ex-patentee always refers (in his apology) as the golden age of the drama, within his long experience, was when Drury Lane (under the first triumvirate of Cibber, Wilks, and Dogget, and the second triumvirate, of Cibber, Wilks, and Booth,) was the only licensed theatre for dramatic performances in London; the Haymarket being confined to opera, and the house in Lincoln's Inn Fields then existing only in the plans of Rich, the ejected patentee of Drury Lane: and yet Cibber lived in the high and palmy days of the theatre. He had seen Hart and Mohun act, the former Shakespeare's grandnephew, and both contemporaries of actors who might have seen Shakespeare play the Ghost in his own Hamlet. He himself became an actor in 1690. He might have been clapped on the shoulders, as a raw young aspirant, by Dryden. He won his greatest successes under the eyes of Congreve and Vanbrugh; and he survived to sneer at the rising fame of Garrick. He is the link between the stage of the Re

storation and the theatre of our great-grandfathers. During his long life he had watched the prime and decay of Betterton, and had seen the best of such actors as Mountford, Nokes, Leigh, Powel, Dogget, Wilks, Booth, Mrs. Barry, Mrs. Betterton, Mrs. Bracegirdle, and Mrs. Oldfield. These actors he thought insufficient to man two theatres; and yet we scatter the strength, or diffuse the weakness of our theatrical army through no fewer than sixteen playhouses!

We can, however, infer little as to the popularity of the stage from the mere number of theatres open in London at any one time. We may infer more as to the quality of actors and plays. It is certain that there must be a public reputed to be hungry, when so many dramatic ordinaries spread their tables. But it does not follow that all the caterers find customers; if they do, it is past dispute that the appetites of the guests must be more sharp-set than discriminating.

In Shakespeare's time, it would seem that all classes were greedy for stage-plays. Besides the regular playhouses, we know that inn-yards were turned into theatres; and Henslowe's Diary affords evidence,—commencing a few years before Shakespeare's earliest-known appearance as a dramatic author,-how omnivorous was the appetite, and how rapid the digestion of London playgoers towards the close of the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the theatres with which Henslowe was connected, and he was a sort of manager, or principal capitalist and ready-money man for several companies, a new play seems to have been produced on an average every eighteen days; and these, be it remembered, were not the skeleton dramas or slight farces of our time, but substantial pieces in five acts, such as we may still read in the printed editions of Marlowe or Ford, Massinger or Middleton, or Dodsley's less-known collection of old plays.

Critics, in comparing our stage with that of Henslowe's days, are apt to forget what an enormous mass of the plays of that time has disappeared altogether. Enough, however, have survived the trunk-makers, the tailors'-measure-makers, and Mr. Warburton's cook, to enable us to judge the authors of that time pretty fairly. But we must be on our guard against measuring the quality of Shakespeare's immediate predecessors, his contemporaries, and followers, by such standards as Marlowe for the first, Ben Jonson for the second, Massinger, or Beaumont and Fletcher for the last. These are the choice ears of the teeming harvest of the Elizabethan theatre. In the case of the rest, the straw and chaff are out of all proportion to the grain; and yet, making all due abatement for the accumulation of bombast, buffoonery, and long-windedness, which has happily perished, we

must acknowledge that there never was a time,-since Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides shook the scene of Athens,-in which so many powerful and accomplished minds were uttering themselves through dramatic forms, as in the sixty years between the first appearance of Marlowe as a dramatist in 1587, and the passing of the act for the suppression of stage-plays and interludes in 1647.

And yet the stage was during all those years denounced from the most popular pulpits. Actors were dealt with as the especial children of Satan, not in sermons only, but in petitions of towncouncils, decrees of university heads, and in the minds and mouths of decent citizens generally. Most of the dramatic authors of that time were actors. There was no great wealth to be earned at the work. 51. seems to have been a high price for a play in 1589, though 201. was not considered excessive in 1613. It is true that, besides receiving the price of his play, the authoractor was often a sharer in the receipts which a successful piece brought to the box of the company;-and in those days all companies were managed on the sharing system. Nor was there at that time any literary fame or profit to be looked for from plays, distinct from what followed their success in the theatre. The comparatively few plays which were printed in that century, as a general rule, found their way to the press long after their run was over upon the boards. Others were printed by some piratical rogue, who took them down in shorthand from the actors' mouths, with a view of making a market of them to some other troupe.

As there were many companies of actors, it was the object of each to keep the "books"* purchased on their account for their own exclusive profit; and, in one case, we learn from Henslowe's Diary that forty shillings was actually paid to the printer not to print a play, of which he had procured the manuscript, while the right of representation belonged to one of Henslowe's companies. There is every reason to believe, that had the printing of his plays depended upon Shakespeare himself, we should have had as few of them preserved as we have of the two hundred and thirty pieces which honest Thomas Heywood claimed to have written, or helped to write.

We have gone thus at length into the details of the Elizabethan theatre, because they will serve us in estimating our own; and because most of the facts we have mentioned seem to lie out of the knowledge, or to escape the consideration, of most of those

*The word "book" is always used of a play by Henslowe, Alleyn, and others connected with theatres who have left dramatic records of the sixteenth century. The word is still used in the theatres. The prompter is always said "to hold the book," though, in nineteen cases out of twenty, he holds only some stitched sheets of manuscript.

who are in the habit of comparing the theatre of the nineteenth with that of the sixteenth century.

In most of the points to which they seem generally to attribute the degeneracy of the modern stage-such as the want of social recognition for actors, the eagerness of the mob for mere amusement, the low remuneration of writers for the stage, the absence among them of literary ambition, and the lack among managers of all appreciation of literary merit-we cannot but think that the theatre of Elizabeth and James I. was, on the whole, more unfavourably placed than our own.

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And yet, compare the one with the other in respect of the works by which each may claim to be remembered. The secret of the difference lies deeper than the relations of author and actor to each other and to the public; it is to be sought for in the bearings of the time upon author, actor, and public alike. the days of good Queen Bess and her successor, the dramatic art was dealing, for the first time, with human life in a youthful, living, and untrammelled spirit. Hence the theatre had irresistible attractions for the most apprehensive and sympathetic minds; for no other mode then existed of so presenting life through fiction. There was no burden of stage-conventions to be got rid of; no hampering rules of stage-usage or stage-treatment to be observed; no rival exigencies of the musician's, scene-painter's, or machinist's art to be consulted. Actors had not then grown into a power altogether subordinating authors, nor authors into a literary class, aiming at fine writing or the expression of deep thought more than at the exhibition of human character and passion through action. Above all, there was then an unspoiled, unsentimental, unhackneyed, and unsophisticated public to please, which judged in a kindred spirit to that in which the author wrote and the actor played,-a public neither nice about probabilities, nor scrupulous about proprieties, nor delicate as to the means employed to stir its pulses, move its tears, or excite its laughter; but insisting on being stirred, moved, or made merry. And for the harvest of excitement, passion, or mirth, there lay the broad field of life-not yet broken up-before the hardy and buoyant tiller of that virgin soil.

We have said, that towards the consummation of the dramatic art author, manager, actor, and public must co-operate. We should have said, that they can co-operate only as their times will permit. The results of their joint labour will probably be mainly determined by circumstances over which, individually or collectively, they can have but little control. But, in so far as they can contribute to any results, it is not easy to say which has the most important part.

Following the obvious order of influences, it would seem