restitution of conjugal rights on one side or on the other. In the
second and third decades, perhaps a little later, a strong effort was
made to give vogue to, and some vogue was obtained for, the scholarly if
pale attempts of Milman and Talfourd, and the respectable work of
others. Bulwer, his natural genius assisted by the stage-craft of
Macready, brought the acting and the literary play perhaps nearer
together than any one else did. Much later still, the mighty authority
of Tennyson, taking to dramatic writing at the time when he was the
unquestioned head of English poetry and English literature, and assisted
by the active efforts of the most popular actor and manager of the day,
succeeded in holding the stage fairly well with plays which are not very
dramatic among dramas, and which are certainly not very poetical among
their author's poems. With more recent times we have luckily nothing to
do, and the assertions of some authors that they themselves or others
have brought back literature to the stage may be left confronted with
the assertions of not a few actors that, for reasons which they do not
themselves profess entirely to comprehend, a modern drama is almost
bound not to be literary if it is to act, and not to act if it is
literary. Some have boldly solved the difficulty by hinting, if not
declaring, that the drama is an outworn form except as mere spectacle or
entertainment; others have exhausted themselves in solutions of a less
trenchant kind; none, it may safely be said, has really solved it. And
though it is quite true that what has happened was predicted sixty or
seventy years ago, as a result of the breach of the monopoly of Covent
Garden and Drury Lane, it is fair to say that the condition of the drama
of at least a quarter of a century earlier had been little if at all
better than it has been since. It is a simple fact that since Sheridan
we have had no dramatist who combined very high acting with very high
literary merit.

Of what have been called the applied departments of literature, a
somewhat less melancholy account has to be given; but, except in their
enormous multiplication of quantity, they present few opportunities for
remarks of a general character.

Very great names have been added to the list of theological writers, but
these names on the whole belong to the earlier rather than to the later
portion of the period, and even then something of a change has been
observable in the kinds of t