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Excerpt from Letters of Bulwer Lytton to Macready The English drama had its sudden out-flowering in the spacious days of Elizabeth; its vigour lessened a little, though its violence increased, under James and Charles; it sprang again into luxuriant life during the Restoration; and it did not die down until after Sheridan and Goldsmith. It became feebler toward the end of the eighteenth century, to flicker almost to extinction during the middle of the next hundred years. And in the final years of the nineteenth century it revived again, to reveal itself as a vivacious rival of the novel. Probably we do not yet appreciate the full merit of the plays written in the past two-score years by the late Sir W. S. Gilbert and Sir A. W. Pinero, Mr. Barrie and Mr. Shaw. But the energetic vitality which we can discover in the drama of our language from 1875 to 1910, and which is equally evident to-day in the younger playwrights in both the British and the American branches of English literature, makes us perceive all the more sharply the flat emptiness of the English-speaking stage in the half-century which stretches from 1825 to 1875. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.