and fair play_" to "EVERY ENGLISH
LIVING DRAMATIST." Considering that the Council of the Dramatic
Authors' Theatre comprises at least half-a-dozen Shakspeares in their
own conceit, to say nothing of one or two _Rowes_ (soft ones of
course), a sprinkling of Otways, with here and there a Massinger, we
may calculate pretty correctly how far the stage they have taken
possession of is likely to be _free_, or the _play_ to be _fair_
towards _Every English living Dramatist_.

It appears that a small knot of very great geniuses have been, for some
time past, regularly sending certain bundles of paper, called Dramas,
round to the different metropolitan theatres, and as regularly
receiving them back again. Some of these geniuses, goaded to madness by
this unceremonious treatment, have been guilty of the insanity of
printing their plays; and, though the "Rejected Addresses" were a very
good squib, the rejected Dramas are much too ponderous a joke for the
public to take; so that, while in their manuscript form, they always
produced speedy _returns_ from the managers, they, in their printed
shape, caused no _returns_ to the publishers. It is true, that a
personal acquaintance of some of the authors with Nokes of the _North
Eastern Independent_, or some other equally-influential country print,
may have gained for them, now and then, an egregious puff, wherein the
writers are said to be equal to Goethe, a cut above Sheridan Knowles,
and the only successors of Shakspeare; but we suspect that "the mantle
of the Elizabethan poets," which is said to have descended on one of
these gentry, would, if inspected, turn out to be something more like
Fitzball's Tagiioni or Dibdin Pitt's Macintosh.

No one can suspect PUNCH of any _prestige_ in favour of the
restrictions laid upon the drama--for our own free-and-easy habit of
erecting our theatre in the first convenient street we come to, and
going through our performance without caring a rush for the Lord
Chamberlain or the Middlesex magistrates, must convince all who know
us, that we are for a thoroughly free trade in theatricals; but,
nevertheless, we think the _Great Unactables_ talk egregious nonsense
when they prate about the possibility of their efforts working "a
beneficial alteration in a law which presses so fatally on dramatic
genius." We think their tom-foolery more likely to induce restrictions
that may prevent others from exposing their mental imbecility, than to
encourage the aut