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Rh that had failed that evening, and perhaps deservedly failed—for he could not close his eyes to the fact that it was sadly lacking in those qualities which appealed at once to a mixed audience—had at least the negative merit of not being an adaptation from the French. Such as it was it was an original play. It had cost him many months of devoted labour, and the labour of those months had evaporated in one evening. He could not say that he was absolutely a ruined man, for he could no doubt, make a much larger and more certain income by translating French plays; but he had hitherto resisted the strong temptation to resort to this very easy means of earning a handsome livelihood—partly from a not unworthy zeal on behalf of English Dramatic Literature, but mainly because he considered the Dramatic Literature of Modern France to be a foul and pestilential cento of moral corruption, degrading alike to the authors who wrote the pieces, to the managers who produced them, and to the polite audiences of both sexes and of all ranks and ages who rejoiced in them. As a clean-minded gentleman he would no more think of drawing inspiration from M. Zola or M. Alexandre Dumas than he would think of drawing drinking water from a grave yard. He hoped that he should not be misunderstood. He did not ask that they should approve his play because it was original. He merely submitted for their consideration the question whether the enormous difficulties with which a dramatic author has to contend in endeavouring to write a play that shall deserve to rank as original should be placed wholly out of the question in