cation; Around the Web; The Exile from Siberia; The False Son; Mother and Daughter; Our Country Cousins; Jealousy; Saints and Sinners; A Modern Godiva; The Croothawn; The Love of His Life; Our Goblins; Zeke Bigelow; The New Evangeline; Suspected; Paul Arniff; and Deception.

SEASON OF 1880-1881.

During the following season, Mr. Edgar Fawcett's comedy Our First Families, a rather bright, yet unsatisfactory play, was produced at Daly's Theater. Our First Families is simply farce elevated at moments to the level of comedy. Miss Anna Dickinson's play An American Girl, which was done at the Fifth Avenue Theater, and which had been written for Miss Fanny Davenport, failed to have any effect. Yet Miss Dickinson was not by any means an untried dramatist. One of her plays, A Crown of Thorns, had been given two or three years previously, and had impressed all impartial observers as a drama marked by strength, poetic imagination, and genuine impulse. Miss Dickinson is also the authoress of a tragedy, Aurelian, which has not yet been acted. Another American play, which was performed at the Union Square Theater, was John Habberton's Deacon Crankett, a piece in which novelty and extravagant situations have the best of it. Deacon Crankett is not worth remembering. Mr. Townsend Percy's Baffled Beauty, acted at the Park Theater, is another play that we are ready to forget. It is a version of Benedict's novel, "Her Friend Lawrence."

That fine and lovely play Yorick's Love, so delightfully written and prepared for our stage by William D. Howells, and acted with success by Mr. Lawrence Barrett and his company at the Park Theater, is, it is known, an adaptation of a drama by the Spaniard Estebanez. Mr. Howells, whose reputation is almost wholly that of a novelist, has treated the Spanish with perfect taste and dramatic feeling. Mr. Campbell's Matrimony, a silly play, was produced at the Standard Theater. Mr. Raymond brought forward Mr. A. C. Gunter's play, Fresh the American—a lively farce at the Park Theater, and Mr. J. B. Runnion's drama, One Hundred Wives, was presented at Booth's Theater. Nothing can be said in praise of Edgar Fawcett's farcical play, Sixes and Sevens, done at the Bijou Opera House. The Professor, which succeeded Hazel Kirke at the Madison Square Theater,

is an innocuous play, by W. H. Gillette. The list of plays produced during this season includes the following: Our Gentlemen Friends; Two Nights in Rome; Edgewood Folks; Tiote; The Prairie Waif; Photos; The Four Seasons; Dreams, or Fun in a Photograph Gallery; A Lucky Hit; Our Flirtations; Woman's Faith; Ninon; Lawn Tennis; False Light; Idle Hours; Heart and Soul; A Mountain Mystery and Bigamy, by Mrs. Henderson; Voyagers in Southern Seas, or The Children of Captain Grant; Needles and Pins; Passion's Slave; Opium; Quartz Valley; That Man from Cattaraugus; The Electrical Doll; Wedlock; A Debt of Honor; Ozone; Ethel; Cobwebs; My Geraldine, by Bartley Campbell; The Landleaguers of Ireland; The Butterfly's Dream, or The Fairy Ball; Salviati, or The Silent Man; Beauty, by G. F. Rowe; Wedded by Fate; Back from the Grave; The Nihilist Sister; Two Lives; Our Goblins at Home; Cinderella at School; The Marionettes; The Convict, by Frederick Maeder; A Mad World; All the Rage; and Fun on the Bristol.

SEASON OF 1881-1882.

Among the many American plays brought forward during this season were: Smiff, by George Fawcett Rowe; Forty-Nine, by Joaquin Miller; Esmeralda, by Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett; Pendragon, by William Young; Old Shipmates, by Robert G. Morris; La Belle Russe, by David Belasco; Florinel, by Sydney Rosenfeld; After the Opera, by A. C. Gunter; The Doctor of Lima, by Salmi Morse; and Baron Rudolph, by Bronson Howard. Of these, those which merit some attention are Esmeralda, Pendragon, and Old Shipmates. All the others are either mediocre or bad. Even Mr. Miller's FortyNine is a feeble drama. The first and the second acts of Mrs. Burnett's play are charming; the third and fourth acts are tediously overdone. The play ends, as a matter of fact, at the close of the second act. Pendragon is a work of unusual merit-fervid, imaginative, and genuine. It is written in a stilted and somewhat old-fashioned manner; but it is, without question, creditable to Mr. Young. Mr. Morris's Old Shipmates is a fresh, breezy play. Mr. Harrigan's amusing play The Major was produced at the Theater Comique during this season. For downright badness, Smiff was, probably, the most conspicuous play of the season, although The Doctor of

Lima, and a few others that have not been named, can be compared with it favorably. Among the numerous plays brought out during this season were: Coney Island, or Little Ethel's Prayer; Furnished Rooms, by Scott Marble; Ruth, An American Wife, by Ruth Everett; Wanted, a Carpenter; My Sweetheart; The Member for Slocum; Quits; The Little Savage; Americans Abroad, by Edgar Fawcett ; Money-bags; A Fool's Errand; The 'Corsican; Ripples; The Passing Regiment; Senator Silverbags; The Spider's Web; The Journalist, by A. C. Gunter; The Bondman, by Lewis Wingfield; Blind-man's Buff; The Planter's Wife; Lionette; A Gay Time at Whymple's; Morna Doon; D. A. M.; Mayberry's Girl; Nora; Mabel Wilberforce; The Curse of Cain; Tania; One of Our People; Ranch No. 10; Max Muller; The White Slave, by Bartley Campbell; The Crimson Cord; Greenroom Fun; Far from the Madding Crowd, adapted by A. R. Cazauran; Lola, or The Miller's Daughter; Too, Too Truly Rural; Fogg's Ferry; A Checkered Life; A Square Man; Western Union Telegraph; Garry Owen, or Labor, Land, and Liberty; Josiah Allen's Wife; Cezalia; The Living Age; The House of Mauprat; The Millionaire; Coming Thro' the Rye, by Pearl Eytinge; The Brothers, by Lewis J. Celia; Molly, a Story of Virginia; and Wild Wave.

SEASON OF 1882-1883.

A Daughter of the Nile was the first American play of any worth produced during the early part of the next season. The author of A Daughter of the Nile is Miss Laura Don, an actress and a bright woman. There is much cleverness in this play, and yet it is a weak play. Among other plays brought out during the first part of the season were: The Black Flag; Brother Gardner and His Lime-kiln Club; Intercepted; The Irish-American; The Blackbird; Zara; Elsa; Chispa; Hoosier Oddfellows; Fritz Among the Gypsies; Ikey Solomons, a Man of Business; Brentwood; Rexina; Helen of Troy; Mordecai Lyons; In Paradise; Our English Friend; McSorley's Inflation; Siberia; and Mat the Romp.

An American drama of really fine quality, however, is Young Mrs. Winthrop, by Bronson Howard. Young Mrs. Winthrop is Mr. Howard's almost perfect play; it is a very charming work, and quite worthy of any dramatist. Mr. Howard, indeed, comes close to that distinction, which, it was

said at the beginning of this article, is not to be found among American dramatists. He is, decidedly, the most accomplished and artistic playwright that we have. Young Mrs. Winthrop is a simple, well-told story of real life, reasonable, temperate, and interesting. The beauty of this play lies both in the subject and in the treatment of this subject. The artistic wholeness of it is surprising and gratifying. It exhibits the relations of a husband and wife, who, although they love each other with devotion, grow gradually apart, and, at the end, are inclined to separate lawfully. The husband has neglected his young wife, and has given his thought and time wholly to business; the wife, driven from the companionship of her husband, has mingled with a society which is unsuited to her taste and feeling. In the closing scene of the play-after the estrangement has been illustrated at its various stages-the wife and husband become lovers again, and there is a bright reunion. It would be hard for any dramatic writer to surpass the methods employed by Mr. Howard throughout the last act of the play.

It is useless to say anything of Mr. Campbell's Siberia, which is a wild and senseless melodrama. We may also pass over plays like Sam'l of Posen, Cheek, and a score of others similar to these, which have no merit whatever. The most recent American plays produced upon our stage are The Rajah, by William Young; Duty, by H. C. De Mille; and An American Wife, by Judge Barrett. The Rajah is a successful but not a strong play.

Mr. Henry Guy Carleton has written a play called Memnon, which is to be produced in 1884. Mr. W. H. Bishop, who has written a comedy for the Madison Square Theater, is well known as a young novelist. Mme. Selina Dolaro has prepared a play for the Union Square Theater. The tendency to encourage American play-writing is, we are glad to observe, somewhat marked now; and the attitude of American authors toward the stage is by no means what it was several years ago, when our literary men appeared to hold the theater in contempt. Mr. Henry James has just written a comedy, Daisy Miller; Mr. Howells is the author of some charming dramatic sketches; Mr. Fawcett, Mr. Joaquin Miller, Mr. Bishop, and other dramatic writers are literary men ; and it is altogether probable that Literature will eventually turn to the Stage in a manner not merely hap-hazard, but serious and sympathetic.

O feeble and fitful were the first attempts to introduce theatrical performances in the American colonies, that it is a matter of doubt when and where dramas were first performed. Holding, as all believers in the truth and beauty of imaginative art must hold, that the histrionic is one of the noblest forms of art; that its condition is a sure evidence of the state of culture to which a community has arrived, and that its influence for good upon the manners and intelligence of a people cannot be overestimated, we believe that the tracing of the history of the American stage reflects in an instructive and amusing fashion the history of the social life and the growth in taste of the nation. The early American stage was, of course, at first but a weak and amateurish offshoot of its brilliant English sister. When, about a century and a quarter ago, those ludicrously ambitious little companies were acting to meager audiences in New York and Philadelphia, the English stage was at the very height of its glory. Garrick was amazing the public with his genius; Charles Macklin was creating the part of Shylock as it is played to this day; Foote was convulsing audiences with his mimicry; Peg Woffington was setting the gallants wild with her beauty and vivacity. Not least in this brilliant coterie was Lewis Hallam, the first actor of any note to appear in this country, often called the "Father of the American Stage"

But before Hallam's theatrical discovery of America there were a few representations of plays which have an interest historically, though in all probability they were artistically beneath contempt. As we haye intimated, it is by no means certain what company was in truth the very first. William Dunlap, in his "History of the American Stage," declares that the first theater opened in America by a company of regular comedians was in Williamsburg, then capital of Virginia, on September 5, 1752 -the first appearance of the Hallam Company; and a centennial commemoration was held at that place in 1852. Mr. Dunlap, however, is clearly mistaken; for, as Mr. J. N. Ireland, in his "Records of the New York Stage, 1750-1860," demonstrates beyond a doubt, there was as early as 1733 a building in New York known as a "Play-house," and so described in public documents, in which performances of some kind were given. And there was also a company of some sort in Philadelphia in 1748, the leader of which, Thomas Kean, dared to play the part of Richard, and headed a company which, as the "New York Gazette revived in the Weekly Postboy" tells us, arrived in New York from Philadelphia in 1750, and gave performances in a house in Nassau street belonging to a Dutch patroon rejoicing in the euphonious name of the Hon. Rip Van Dam. Here were performed Richard III., "wrote originally by Shakespeare," the Beaux' Stratagem, the Spanish Friar, and the Mock Doctor. The company met with little success, and soon disbanded. It was thought by some-and we give it as illustrating the position held by the good people of New England on the theater-that this Kean and a fellow actor, Murray, assisted by amateurs, were the bold men whose performance of Otway's Orphan in a