true that
amazing coincidences do occur in life; but when they are invented to
serve an artist's purposes, we feel that he is simplifying his task
altogether beyond reason, and substituting for normal and probable
development an irrelevant plunge into the merely marvellous.

Of the abuse of coincidence, I have already given a specimen in speaking
of _The Rise of Dick Halward_ (Chapter XII). One or two more examples
may not be out of place. I need not dwell on the significance of the
fact that most of them occur in forgotten plays.

In _The Man of Forty_, by Mr. Walter Frith, we find the following
conjuncture of circumstances: Mr. Lewis Dunster has a long-lost wife and
a long-lost brother. He has been for years in South Africa; they have
meanwhile lived in London, but they do not know each other, and have
held no communication. Lewis, returning from Africa, arrives in London.
He does not know where to find either wife or brother, and has not the
slightest wish to look for them; yet in the first house he goes to, the
home of a lady whose acquaintance he chanced to make on the voyage, he
encounters both his wife and his brother! Not quite so startling is the
coincidence on which _Mrs. Willoughby's Kiss_, by Mr. Frank Stayton, is
founded. An upper and lower flat in West Kensington are inhabited,
respectively, by Mrs. Brandram and Mrs. Willoughby, whose husbands have
both been many years absent in India. By pure chance the two husbands
come home in the same ship; the two wives go to Plymouth to meet them,
and by pure chance, for they are totally unacquainted with each other,
they go to the same hotel; whence it happens that Mrs. Willoughby,
meeting Mr. Brandram in a half-lighted room, takes him for her husband,
flies to his arms and kisses him. More elaborate than either of these is
the tangle of coincidences in Mr. Stuart Ogilvie's play, _The
White Knight_--

Giulietta, the ward of David Pennycuick, goes to study singing at Milan.
Mr. Harry Rook, Pennycuick's most intimate friend, meets her by chance
in Milan, and she becomes his mistress, neither having the least idea
that the other knows Pennycuick. Then Viscount Hintlesham, like
Pennycuick, a dupe of Rook's, meets her by chance at Monte Carlo and
falls in love with her. He does not know that she knows Rook or
Pennycuick, and she does not know that he knows them. Arriving in
England, she finds in the manager, the promoter, and the chairman of the
Electric White Lead C