e skirmishes, rather than our
feuds. In it Colin Clout and his comrades return.

The Intimate Photoplay should not crowd its characters. It should not
choke itself trying to dramatize the whole big bloody plot of Lorna
Doone, or any other novel with a dozen leading people. Yet some gentle
episode from the John Ridd farm, some half-chapter when Lorna and the
Doones are almost forgotten, would be fitting. Let the duck-yard be
parading its best, and Annie among the milk-pails, her work for the
evening well nigh done. The Vicar of Wakefield has his place in this
form. The Intimate-and-friendly Motion Picture might very well give
humorous moments in the lives of the great, King Alfred burning the
cakes, and other legendary incidents of him. Plato's writings give us
glimpses of Socrates, in between the long dialogues. And there are
intimate scraps in Plutarch.

Prospective author-producer, do you remember Landor's Imaginary
Conversations, and Lang's Letters to Dead Authors? Can you not attain to
that informal understanding in pictorial delineations of such people?

The photoplay has been unjust to itself in comedies. The late John
Bunny's important place in my memory comes from the first picture in
which I saw him. It is a story of high life below stairs. The hero is the
butler at a governor's reception. John Bunny's work as this man is a
delightful piece of acting. The servants are growing tipsier downstairs,
but the more afraid of the chief functionary every time he appears,
frozen into sobriety by his glance. At the last moment this god of the
basement catches them at their worst and gives them a condescending but
forgiving smile. The lid comes off completely. He himself has been
imbibing. His surviving dignity in waiting on the governor's guests is
worthy of the stage of Goldsmith and Sheridan. This film should be
reissued in time as a Bunny memorial.

So far as my experience has gone, the best of the comedians is Sidney
Drew. He could shine in the atmosphere of Pride and Prejudice or
Cranford. But the best things I have seen of his are far from such. I beg
the pardon of Miss Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell while I mention Who's Who
in Hogg's Hollow, and A Regiment of Two. Over these I rejoiced like a
yokel with a pocketful of butterscotch and peanuts. The opportunities to
laugh on a higher plane than this, to laugh like Olympians, are seldom
given us in this world.

The most successful motion picture drama of the intim