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Excerpt from The Masterpieces of Modern Drama: English and American, Abridged in Narrative, With Dialogue of the Great Scenes Now that the nineteenth century has so far receded from us that we can begin to survey it in a perspective not dis torted by the prejudices which always mar our vision of the immediate present, we are at last able to sum up its efforts and its achievements 1n the several arts. When we consider the literature of the past hundred years we cannot fail to remark upon the extraordinary and unp recedentcd vogue Of prose-fiction, beginning with the startpling success Of the Waverly novels of Scott m England m the first quar ter Of the century stimulated by the mdefatigable curiosity which sustains the Human Comedy Of Balzac ln France m the mid-years and ennobled by the lofty veracity Of Tol stoy' s later studies Of human struggles m Russia m ythe final decades. Poets there were in all the modern literatures, poets Of high ambition and Of genuine inspiration as well as sincere aspiration historians and biographers, critics and essayists, there were in abundance and yet the novel ista outnumbered the others and seemed aty times almost to outshine them. Indeed, the attraction Of fiction was so potent that poets laid aside their singing robes to tell tales in humble rose; and historians, critics, and essayists now and again werted their own fields to adventure themsel ves as novelists. 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 imperfect