egular institution, apparently
because a host of suburban theatres drew away its audiences. Of all
these English melodramas, only one, _The Silver King_, by Henry Arthur
Jones (Princess's, 1882), could for a moment compare in invention or
technical skill with the French dramas they supplanted. The fact
remains, however, that even on this lowest level of dramatic art the
current of the time set decisively towards home-made pictures of English
life, however crude and puerile.

For twenty-five years, from 1865 to 1890, the English stage was overrun
with French operettas of the school of Offenbach. Hastily adapted by
slovenly hacks, their librettos (often witty in the original) became
incredible farragos of metreless doggrel and punning ineptitude. The
great majority of them are now so utterly forgotten that it is hard to
realize how, in their heyday, they swarmed on every hand in London and
the provinces. The reaction began in 1875 with the performance at the
Royalty theatre of _Trial by Jury_, by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur
Sullivan. This was the prelude to that brilliant series of witty and
melodious extravaganzas which began with _The Sorcerer_ at the Opera
Comique theatre in 1877, but was mainly associated with the Savoy
theatre, opened by R. D'Oyly Carte (d. 1901) in 1881. Little by little
the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas (of which the most famous, perhaps,
were _H.M.S. Pinafore_, 1878, _Patience_, 1881, and _The Mikado_, 1885)
undermined the popularity of the French opera-bouffes, and at the same
time that of the indigenous "burlesques" which, graceful enough in the
hands of their inventor J. R. Planche, had become mere incoherent
jumbles of buffoonery, devoid alike of dramatic ingenuity and of
literary form. When, early in the 'nineties, the collaboration between
Gilbert and Sullivan became intermittent, and the vogue of the Savoy
somewhat declined, a new class of extravaganza arose, under the
designation of "musical comedy" or "musical farce." It first took form
in a piece called _In Town_, by Messrs "Adrian Ross" and Osmond Carr
(Prince of Wales's theatre, 1892), and rapidly became very popular. In
these plays the scene and costumes are almost always modern though
sometimes exotic, and the prose dialogue, setting forth an attenuated
and entirely negligible plot, is frequently interrupted by musical
numbers. The lyrics are often very clever pieces of rhyming, totally
different from the inane doggrel of the old opera