carefully written dialogue, and a strict attention to probability. Avoid these two stumbling blocks (and nothing is easier than to avoid them), and your piece will succeed triumphantly. But it is not easy to write a stage-play which, on account of its literary merit, shall deserve to succeed. The difficulty of the task may be gauged by the rarity of its accomplishment. All for Her was a play in which success had been most deservedly attained. Mr. Wills' exquisite drama Olivia was another. The fact that one play was suggested by "A Tale of Two Cities," and the other by "The Vicar of Wakefield," did not militate against their claim to originality. The authors had gathered no more from those works than they could have gathered from an anecdote told over a dinner-table. But in these cases the authors had the advantage of admirable interpretation. Without adequate interpretation the better the play, in an intellectual sense, the more likely it is to fail. He had nothing to say in defence of his own unhappy play, but he would put it to the jury whether, after the evidence of the actors and actresses engaged in the piece, they believed that the play, as they saw it, was a reflex of his intention? He ventured to believe, on these actors' and actresses' own showing, that he had been exceptionally unfortunate. Happily for the welfare of the drama, it very rarely happened that actors took such monstrous liberties with an author's play as they had taken with his. But it is an undoubted fact that such liberties can be taken in ill-disciplined theatres when the actors are self-willed and opinionated, and the author a man of no influence. In any case, the audience could never be sure whether
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Actors, Authors, and Audiences.
