have, with the exception of a few protesters, general consent that
the English drama of the nineteenth century has displayed one curious
and disastrous characteristic. The plays, as a rule, which have been
good literature have either never been acted or have seldom succeeded as
plays; the plays that have been acted and have been successful have
seldom been good literature.

The best idea of the state of the drama between 1790 and 1810 may
perhaps be obtained by any one who cares to look through--it would
require a monomania, a desert island, or at least a succession of wet
days in a country inn to enable any one to _read_ through--the ten
volumes of Mrs. Inchbald's _Modern British Theatre_, printed in 1811
"from the prompt-books of the Theatres Royal." This publication,
supplementing the larger _British Theatre_ of the same editor, contains
more than two volumes of the works of Frederick Reynolds, a prolific
playwright who was responsible for the English version of _Werther_ in
drama; another of Mrs. Inchbald's own writing and adaptation; one of
Holcroft's later works; one of Cumberland's; and the other five made up
of lesser pieces by Colman the younger, Dibdin, and others, serious
plays in blank verse such as Hannah More's _Percy_, and the Honourable
John St. John's _Mary Queen of Scots_, etc. More than one of these was a
person of talent, more than one a person even of very great talent;
while Holcroft and Colman, if not others, had displayed special ability
for drama. Yet there is, perhaps, in the fifty plays of the ten volumes
only one that can be called a good play, only one which is readable, and
that is the _Trip to Scarborough_, which Sheridan simply adapted, which
he did little more than edit, from Vanbrugh's _Relapse_. Outside these
volumes the acting drama of the period may be best studied in the other
and better work of the pair just mentioned, and in O'Keefe.

John O'Keefe, or O'Keeffe (for the name is spelt both ways), was a very
long-lived man, who was born at Dublin in 1748 and died at Southampton
in 1833. But in the later years of his life he suffered from blindness;
and the period of his greatest dramatic activity almost exactly
coincided with that of our first chapter. He is said to have written
some fifty pieces, of various kinds, between 1781 and 1798; and in the
latter year he published a collection of about thirty, referring in the
preface to others which "an inconsiderate disposal of the copyri