The attention of the pupil should be confined as much as possible to the most classical writers; and the French would furnish a most useful subsidiary in a course of history.

Each act, as we have seen, should consist of, or at all events contain, a subordinate crisis, contributory to the main crisis of the play: and the art of act-construction lies in giving to each act an individuality and interest of its own, without so rounding it off as to obscure even for a moment its subsidiary, and, in the case of the first act, its introductory, relation to the whole.