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Now, Tennyson, undoubtedly, from every point of view that one can classify exactly, was far better equipped for playwriting than hundreds of successful dramatists yet he failed. Why? The puzzle does not end nor begin with him.

Languidly I undid the brown paper. The contents were a pile of typewritten pages and a letter. It was the letter over which my glassy eyes travelled first. "My own dear, brave, old darling James," it began, and its purport was that she had written a play, and wished me to put my name to it and hawk it round: to pass off as my work her own amateurish effort at playwriting. Ludicrous.

Furthermore, he believed in adhering to good taste and to the rules of art; these things, it seemed to him, had been ignored in the writing of these books. From fiction the conversation drifted to playwriting, and here again the curate and the canon were of the same mind. The actors of their age chose plays that appealed to people of nonsense and with bad taste.

This, however, is anticipating matters. We are still in the summer of 1794, and we left Coleridge at Bristol with Southey, Lovell, and the Miss Frickers. To this year belongs that remarkable experiment in playwriting at high pressure, The Fall of Robespierre.

He alternated his playwriting with the hardest manual drudgery; and though the inexhaustible animal spirits which show themselves in his writing explain how he was able to combine extraordinary literary fertility with a life of difficulty and poverty, it must remain a mystery how and when he picked up his education, and his surprising mastery of the Latin language both in metre and diction.

However, for several years Robert J. Collier and my brother had been very close friends, and Richard had written many articles and stories for Collier's Weekly, so that when Collier urged my brother to go to the Japanese-Russian War as correspondent with the Japanese forces, Richard promptly gave up his playwriting and returned to his old love the role of reporter.

The success of his farce "The Dictator" had been a source of the greatest pleasure to Richard, and he settled down to playwriting with the same intense zeal he put into all of his work.

Most of the authors of these librettos remained unknown: they used pseudonyms, partly because playwriting was not an occupation that befitted a scholar, and partly because in these works they criticized the conditions of their day.

Without our Royal Academy of Music it is probable that Ta-ra-boom-de-ay would represent the high-water mark of our national taste. A public would grow up able to appreciate a play as a play, and not merely as a digester or a pick-me-up; playwriting would not be the lottery it is; and the actor, no longer a mere public pet, would receive more dignified recognition as an artist.

But they had reassured him: "Oh, come on we'll teach you how to dance at the ball it won't be formal. Besides, we'll give you some lessons before we go." Playwriting and playing Five Hundred had prevented their giving him the lessons.