e Bride of Lammermoor_ in which the story and
characters are vastly improved. Alas, poor Scott! On top of all this we
hear of countless adaptations on the market, so that the ignorant wonder
whether our dramatists are played out.

Perhaps the secret is to be discovered in some passages that occurred
during the trial of an action a little while ago, between two
publishers, in which there was evidence to the effect that a book could
not be a novel unless it had a love-story.

Of course, if upon our playwrights is imposed the limitation that all
their plays must contain a love-story, the difficulty of the position is
very great, and the greater still because they are not allowed to tell
naughty love-stories unless they force upon them a moral ending, and
they are very rarely permitted to indulge in a love-story which does not
end in a wedding or the reconciliation of respectably wedded citizens.
No wonder that as a body they seem to be getting bankrupt in
imagination; they appear to be in the position of a cook who is never
allowed to handle anything but sweets.

The state of things is rather curious. It may be often asserted
truthfully of the West End theatres that there are as many love-stories
as playhouses. Of late years, notwithstanding the evidence referred to,
some of our novelists have shown a tendency to break away from the
tradition; also some of the unfashionable playwrights exhibit signs of
revolt; but the managers are timid, very timid, in the matter, and this
is curious, because one has only to turn to Shakespeare to see that we
have had modern successes with plays in which the love-story is trifling
when it exists at all--_Hamlet_, for instance, and _Macbeth_, _Julius
Caesar_, _King Lear_, _Henry VIII._, and other historical pieces.
Indeed, as soon as one begins to enumerate it appears that in most of
the Shakespearean plays presented of late years the love interest, if
any, has been a minor matter. Our managers might learn something from
this.

There is mighty little sentimental love in the plays of "G.B.S." that
have, or have had, a perilously disturbing vogue. And, indeed, when that
ferocious dramatist does handle love it is in an intensely unsentimental
fashion.

Moreover, love in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas is treated with cruel
levity. Turn, by the way, to another great social satirist, Moliere; one
finds again that love sometimes is ignored, and when handled at all
often treated dryly, or as