r of five
hundred years old, it would have the same effect to-day on the average
London playgoer if it was produced in a west end theatre.) The plot
was simple. It is set forth in Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native";
but, as the people who read my books have no energy left over to cope
with other authors, I must supply an outline of it myself.

Entered, first of all, the English Knight, announcing his
determination to fight and vanquish the Turkish Knight, a vastly
superior swordsman, who promptly made mincemeat of him. After the
Saracen had celebrated his victory in verse, and proclaimed himself
the world's champion, entered Snt George, who, after some preliminary
patriotic flourishes, promptly made mincemeat of the Saracen--to the
blank amazement of an audience which included several retired army
officers. Snt George, however, saved his face by the usual expedient
of the victorious British general, attributing to Providence a result
which by no polite stretch of casuistry could have been traced to the
operations of his own brain. But here the dramatist was confronted
by another difficulty: there being no curtain to ring down, how were
the two corpses to be got gracefully rid of? Entered therefore the
Physician, and brought them both to life. (Any one objecting to this
scene on the score of romantic improbability is hereby referred to
the Royal College of Physicians, or to the directors of any accredited
medical journal, who will hail with delight this opportunity of
proving once and for all that re-vitalisation is the child's-play of
the Faculty.)

Such then is the play that I have stolen. For all the many pleasing
esthetic qualities you will find in it--dramatic inventiveness, humor
and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and the like--you must bless
the original author: of these things I have only the usufruct. To
me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience
that has been crammed in. Modest? Not a bit of it. It is my civistic
conscience that makes a man of me and (incidentally) makes this play
a masterpiece.

Nothing could have been easier for me (if I were some
one else) than to perform my task in that
God-rest-you-merry-gentlemen-may-nothing-you-dismay spirit which
so grossly flatters the sensibilities of the average citizen by its
assumption that he is sharp enough to be dismayed by what stares
him in the face. Charles Dickens had lucid intervals in which he was
vaguely conscious of the a