conscious desire to reflect the life of the time.

The Contrast is a very evident copy of The School for Scandal. It shows on its face the mark of imitation, but it likewise shows certain definite and original traits. The society setting is the Battery, New York; the society spirit is the London drawing room. But the importance attached to this poor copy of Sheridan is that it definitely, and for the first time, launches the Yankee type on a long career of evolution, through various stages of caricature, through different lingoes and every variety of costume inventiveness could prescribe.

The Yankee's marks of tongue are as distinguishing as his chin beard and striped trousers. In The Contrast, Jonathan says "dang it", "tarnation", "tarnal", "gor", and uses other such New England phrases. He sings Yankee Doodle, and has a provincial horror of the theatre, though he is human enough to sit enthralled when he accidentally finds himself in one. From the very outset there is a downright, common honesty about the type always emphasized on the stage-which lends striking contrast to the high-flown social ambitions of the society group, grubbing for money and for social prestige.

The success of Tyler with his comedy started William Dunlap on the road to writing plays and managing theatres. And thus, in one fell swoop, The Contrast is responsible for the Father of American Comedy and for the Father of the American Theatre.

The plays of our forefathers developed along broad lines. Though many of them are preserved, and differ in details of treatment, there are dominant streaks of development which may be succinctly summarized. The after-Revolutionary period of drama shows the conflict of views on the Constitution, when political parties were having their factional arguments and often splitting families, as Tory and Loyal feeling rent homes in the Revolution. Samuel Low's The Politician Out-witted (1788), Federalism Triumphant (1802), by an unknown hand, and many other similar pieces are illustrative of this interest. Let us eavesdrop and hear what the fathers of a youthful couple in love have to say, each to the other, of their political opinions-differences which threaten to upset the even tenor of their children's

romance:

LOVEYET. I tell you it [the Constitution] is the most infernal scheme that ever was devis'd.

TRUEMAN. And I tell you, sir, that your argument is heterodox, sophistical, and most preposterously illogical.

LOVEYET. I insist upon it, sir, you know nothing at all about the matter; and give me leave to tell you, sir—

TRUEMAN. What-give you leave to tell me I know nothing at all about the matter! I shall do no such thing, sir-I'm not to be govern'd by your ipse dixit.

LOVEYET. I desire none of your musty Latin, sir, for I don't understand, not I.

TRUEMAN. Oh, the ignorance of the age! To propose a plan of government like the new Constitution.

I should say, therefore, to those who asked what plays amused our forefathers, other than the standard repertories brought them by visiting actors from London, or maintained by native actors of the same mould, that they were political in character, rural, historical, dealing with all the wars, and distinctly social. The American theatre kept close to the life about it-for Indians were among its audience and often appeared as participants on the playbills, and the darkey invited the early development of the minstrel, who was a much more highly developed type than the plays written for him would suggest. It is unfortunate that in the study of American plays-not as literature, but as vehicles of entertainment, and thus the measure of current theatre taste these unliterary scripts are not regarded as being amplified by the skilled acting of the period. From 1800 to 1870 the American drama developed along lines encouraged by the tragic proportions of the actor Forrest, and the comedy skill of James H. Hackett. There was likewise that interest in the theatre which clings to literary groups of writers; and so we have dramatists of the Philadelphia school and of the Knickerbocker school, who were frequenters of first nights and approached the stage through encouragement from and personal touch with the players.

Native characteristics were continually developed, and thus we have as long a list of Indian plays as of Yankee pieces. Cooper did not usurp the field. And to add to the vividness of the type, Forrest gave memorable performances, beginning in

1829, of Metamora, or, The Last of the Wampanoags, which exactly suited his animalism and his colorful dignity.

Polite drama, otherwise known as high comedy, came to the fore when Anna Cora Mowatt wrote Fashion (1845), and this piece is typical of a long line of similar plays: from James N. Barker's Tears and Smiles (1807) and Mrs. Bateman's Self (1856) through Bronson Howard's Saratoga to the polished irony of Landon Mitchell's The New York Idea. The social ambitions of the nouveau riche, the directness of the American Yankee, undazzled by pretensions and wealth, the disrupting demands of climbers, seem crude in every point, but they were real to the dramatists and audiences brought up amidst Victorian morals and manners. Take Tiffany, in Fashion, and you will note what one writer has termed the "high pressure system" at work which characterizes present-day American business methods. The dialogue of these plays is not brilliant, the plots are meagre, but they are first-hand note-books of manners. In fact, we are told there were New York parvenues who did not care for Mrs. Mowatt after she had written Fashion!

The dramatists of our forefathers were always true to current events. Leacock's The Fall of British Tyranny introduced Washington for the first time in fiction. When Dunlap wrote his André, the Major was still alive, pointing to a contemporaneousness not often equalled.

Read John Murdock's The Politicians, or, A State of Things (1798) for conditions during Washington's second administration; turn to Dunlap's Yankee Chronology (1812) for the temper of the war; consult A. B. Lindsley's Love and Friendship (1809) for a reflection of the Embargo. Smith's The Eighth of January (1829) deals with Jackson's victory at New Orleans; Mead's Wall Street, or, Ten Minutes Before Three (1819) reflects some of the crudities of the banking system; Freemasonry is discussed in Kendall's The Doleful Tragedy of the Raising of Jo. Burnham (1832); and Mormon life of 1853 is discussed in a play by Thomas Dunn English.

Is there not some value to a kodak picture of Wall Street traffic in the following from Mead's play? Mr. Oldtimes goes to a bank with a check:

OLDTIMES. What a crowd here is, pushing and shoving, and counting money-paper rags. I can remember when good old gold and silver were all the money we had; and then every man was his own banker. But, now, we have banks, and brokers, and shinners, and shavers, and along with them your merchant tailors, and your merchant shoemakers, and your merchant this thing and that thing.?

There is no end to such plays, and most of them have served their contemporary purpose, and have not the literary merit to survive. Political parties, Clay and Jackson, trade conditions, fashions, French influence, the approach of Abolition-all these themes were very live to the dramatists of the day. And as such, they hold the picture of the moment. Here is a glimpse of the politician's grip on voters in Virginia, in 1824, a scene from L. Sawyer's Blackbeard:

TURPIS. (A common people's candidate for representative to the State Assembly, to a constituent.) I'll stand to it, I want no better friend than this jug, with what little I can put in slyly between drinks. The bottle's the best electioneerer, after all.

MULEY. That's right, stick to the bottle. Treat the children with cakes, and their mothers with punch: it will set their tongues running in

your praise.

If you can gain the women, you are sure of the men,

as the head of a ship is steer'd by the stern, or

TURPIS. Or as a butcher steers a calf by the tail. Yes, I think we shall get the advantage of Candid, eh, Muley? For though he has got more book knowledge, I have got more impudence, which will stand me in its stead, with a majority. Have you seen old Roughy? We must gain him; for he has more influence than any man in the county. His sons, and brothers, and uncles, and their connections could nearly elect a man of themselves. But do you have me a jug of whiskey on the grounds. Zounds; I can't afford to give away brandy; it would cost six pence a vote, but with whiskey I can get them for half that.

This philosophy is easily sustained by the results of the democratic vote: Turpis won!

Tyler's The Contrast, in the rôle of Jonathan, gave us the first Yankee in the theatre. A book might well be written on this personage, so well held in the popular mind by the figure of Uncle Sam. Appealing to the groundlings at first, superior acting brought it to its highest form. There was pleasant rivalry

Quoted in P. I. Reed's Thesis.

among the comedians of the day, whose power of mimicry and appreciation of Yankee eccentricity were their chief assets.

The form of entertainment that encouraged such Yankee delineation as that in which James H. Hackett excelled-in which he varied the evening with passages of New England drawl, of Irish brogue and of French vivacity-was probably suggested to him by the success of the English actor, Charles Matthews, in a similar programme. But the character of the Yankee, as a creative being, was indigenous to the soil.

A long list of plays exploited the type. There were L. Beach's Jonathan Postfree, or, The Honest Yankee (1807); Samuel Woodworth's pastoral, The Forest King, or, American Farmers (1825); Logan's The People's Lawyer and The Vermont Wooddealer (1844). The very names of the lanky countrymen are suggestive of the long drawl and the short manners: Horsebean Hemlock, Solon Shingle, Deuteronomy Dutiful, and Sam Slick.

George H. Hill and Dan Marble were two other actors who made the Yankee peculiarly their own. In fact, so great a reputation did they attain that one only had to address a letter to "Yankee" Hill to have it reach him, wherever he happened to be.

None of these actors had any far-fetched notion that they were helping to develop a phase of the American drama. They dropped into eccentric acting through their peculiar, specialized gifts, and plays were adapted to their ability. These were the requirements, when an actor asked a playwright for a drama-to fit him with a cloak of his artistic texture. All of the prizes offered by Edwin Forrest in the interests of American playwriting were awarded on condition that their results might contain rôles suited to him. That is why our early American tragedyexamples of which are perhaps richer than in any other form -modelled, as was John Howard Payne's Brutus, on English lines, might be called the muscular school of American drama. Strange to say, in the midst of all this romantic tragedy that went far afield in setting and plot from the homespun of America, there breathed, as for instance in R. T. Conrad's Jack Cade (1835), a spirit of liberty which overcame the foreign strangeness of subject and won American sympathy. When Henry DeMille wrote his French Revolutionary Paul Kauvar, he aimed to