SOME DRAMATIC BOOKS AND CRITICS

It will be easily seen that in this random ramble I have as a rule only mentioned some of our best plays and players. I dare not have done so had I been trying to write history. I have only had the assurance to scan books, and make some notes that may be of use to the historian. But, of course, the best service a scribbler like myself could do for an interesting historian of the drama would be to make as complete a catalogue as possible of all the printed books and matter referring to the players and the drama from the earliest times down to the present time. Such work would, of course, be of immense value to the historian, but very dry reading; in fact, not the history of the drama that is so much required, and which, if well written, should be of the best reading in English literature. It would indeed be interesting to find an historian who would have the courage to write about the time of the actual beginning of the mimic drama—that is, when men, if not women, worked or rather played or sang to amuse their fellow-creatures. Might one almost imagine that the first mothers in the world were players when they sang, chanted, or in some such way lulled their children to sleep; or, perhaps a speculation more likely, was there ever a time when human nature had no soul for mimicry? if so, at that time there was very little dramatic history.