nd better methods substituted. And we shall
never appreciate eighteenth century play-making to the full until we
understand that the authors wrote in protest against a sickly sort of
unnatural sentimentality, mawkish and untrue to life, which had become
fashionable on the English stage in the hands of Foote, Colman and
others. Sheridan brought back common sense and Goldsmith dared to
introduce "low" characters and laughed out of acceptance the
conventional separation of the socially high and humble in English life.
His preface to _The Good Natured Man_ will be found instructive reading
in relation to this service.

From 1775 to 1860 the English stage, looked back upon from the vantage
point of our time, appears empty, indeed. It did not look so barren, we
may believe, to contemporaries. Shakespeare was doctored to suit a false
taste; so great an actor-manager as Garrick complacently playing in a
version of _Lear_ in which the ruined king does not die and Cordelia
marries Edgar; an incredible prettification and falsification of the
mighty tragedy! Jonson writes for the stage, though the last man who
should have done so. Sheridan Knowles, in the early nineteenth century,
gives us _Virginius_, which is still occasionally heard, persisting
because of a certain vigor and effectiveness of characterization, though
hopelessly old-fashioned in its rhetoric and its formal obeyance of
outworn conventions, both artistic and intellectual. The same author's
_The Honeymoon_ is also preserved for us through possessing a good part
for the accomplished actress. Later Bulwer, whose feeling for the stage
cannot be denied, in _Money_, _Richelieu_, and _The Lady of Lyons_,
shows how a certain gift for the theatrical, coupled with less critical
standards, will combine to preserve dramas whose defects are now only
too apparent.

As the nineteenth century advances the fiction of Reade and Dickens is
often fitted to the boards and the fact that the latter was a natural
theater man gave and still gives his product a frequent hearing on the
stage. To meet the beloved characters of this most widely read of all
English fictionists is in itself a pleasure sufficient to command
generous audiences. Boucicault's _London Assurance_ is good stage
material rather than literature. Tom Taylor produced among many stage
pieces a few of distinct merit; his _New Men and Old Acres_ is still
heard, in the hands of experimental amateurs, and reveals sterling
qual