But Robertson is decidedly strongest when he walks without crutches.  His own original plays, Society, Caste, Ours, are by far his best.  A foreign support made him limp.  Of all his adaptations, home alone is really good:  most of the others failed.  Although that cosmopolitan mosaic School has been the most successful of his pieces in London—­it has passed its five hundredth night—­it is by no means the best.  Success is not necessarily a test of real merit.  Evidently, School has the elements of popularity, although it is a very weak piece, although it is full of foreign matter, and although it violates that most necessary rule of dramatic art, declaring no play should contain an effect, a line, a scene or an act which does not bear on the end in view by developing either the characters or the action.  The entire second act, containing the farcical examination-scene, is useless.  Robertson again sinned in this way in the Nightingale:  although it had no effect on the plot, although it was entirely unnecessary, he introduced a pretty tableau representing the heroine, a lovely prima-donna, singing under the silver moonbeams in a boat rocked to and fro by the waves.

I have before spoken of Robertson’s fondness for love-scenes.  There are almost as many of them in one of his comedies as in one of Mr. Anthony Trollope’s novels.  And they are generally very good.  What can be more delicious than the “spooning” in Home, if it is not the billing and cooing in Ours?  But what can be more commonplace or more objectionable than the frequent remarks about love and Cupid scattered through his plays?  Tom Stylus says in Society, “Love is an awful swindler—­always drawing upon Hope, who never honors his drafts—­a sort of whining beggar, continually moved on by the maternal police.  But ’tis a weakness to which the wisest of us are subject—­a kind of manly measles which this flesh is heir to, particularly when the flesh is heir to nothing else.  Even I have felt the divine damnation—­I mean emanation.  But the lady united herself to another, which was a very good thing for me, and anything but a misfortune for her.”  This is altogether false:  no man could ever say such things seriously—­at least no man of sense would, and Tom Stylus is a man of sense.  See, too, this bit of dialogue in Play: 

“AMANDA.  You are a good girl, and will be rewarded some day with a good man’s love for this.

“ROSIE.  I don’t want it.  I don’t want anything to do with love.  Love’s a nasty, naughty, wicked boy, and the sooner he’s put in convict-clothes and refused a ticket-of-leave, the better.”

That is false too:  the affected smartness of the wit does not suit the situation; or, rather, as a writer in the Athenaeum has said of a similar speech, “it suits any occasion.”