poets of the past, the masters whom he respected--Sophocles and
Shakspere and Molière--each of them, accepting the formula of the
theater as this had been elaborated by his immediate predecessors,
enlarged this formula, modified it, made it over to suit his own ampler
outlook on life, and thus stamped his own individuality upon the drama
of succeeding generations.

Shakspere and Molière are accepted by us now as the greatest of dramatic
poets; but to their own contemporaries they were known rather as
ingenious playwrights up to every trick of the trade, finding their
profit in every new device of their fellow-craftsmen, and emerging
triumphant from a judgment by "the standard of material prosperity." And
by this same standard, unworthy as it may seem to some, Lope de Vega and
Calderon were judged in their own day. Corneille and Racine also,
Beaumarchais and Sheridan, Hugo and Augier and Rostand. The standard of
material prosperity is not the only test,--indeed, it is not the final
test,--but it is the first and the most imperative, because a dramatist
who fails to please the play-going public of his own time will never
have another chance. There is no known instance of a poet unsuccessful
on the stage in his own country and winning recognition in the theater
after his death. Posterity never reverses the unfavorable verdict of an
author's contemporaries; it has no time to waste on this, for it is too
busy reversing the favorable verdicts which seem to it to be in
disaccord with the real merits of the case.

It was Mark Twain who pithily summed up a prevailing opinion when he
said that "the classics are the books everybody praises--and nobody
reads." Let us hope that this is an overstatement and not the exact
truth; but whatever the proportion of verity in Mark Twain's saying,
there is no doubt that we are running no great risk if we reverse it and