play should take here, you benighted New-Yorkers will be illuminated with it immediately after it has run its hundredth night in the city which is so proud of its son.

This was the second of his pieces to be given performance, “Anne Boleyn” never seeing the boards.  “The Betrothal” was produced at the Philadelphia Walnut Street Theatre, on September 25, 1850, and opened in New York, on November 18 of the same year.  Taylor wrote to its author, on December 4:  “I saw the last night....  It is even better as an acting play than I had anticipated, but it was very badly acted.  I have heard nothing but good of it, from all quarters.”  It was Elizabethan in tone, quite in the spirit of that romantic drama practised by such American authors as Willis, Sargent and others.  How it was received when presented in London, during 1853, is reflected in Boker’s letter to Stoddard, dated October 9, 1853: 

I have read the Times notice of the “Betrothal.”  It is honey to most of the other newspaper criticisms....  Notwithstanding, and taking the accounts of my enemies for authority, the play was unusually successful with the audience on that most trying occasion, the first night....  The play stands a monument of English injustice.  Mark you, it was not prejudice that caused the catastrophe; it was fear lest I should get a footing on their stage, of which “Calaynos” had given them timely warning.

“The Widow’s Marriage,” in manuscript, and never published, was accepted by Marshall, manager of the Walnut, and is noted by Boker, in a letter to Stoddard, October 12, 1852, the chief handicap confronting him being the inability to find someone suited to take the leading role.  Stoddard’s own comment was: 

Whether [it] was ever produced I know not, but I should say not, for the part of the principal character, Lady Goldstraw, is one which no actress whom I remember could have filled to the satisfaction of her creator.  The fault of this character (me judice) is that it is too good to be played on a modern stage.  It ought to have been written for antiquity two hundred years ago.

Boker was right when he referred to himself as “prolific” at this time.  He already had produced, in 1851, according to markings on the manuscript, a piece called “All the World a Mask,” and he had written “The Podesta’s Daughter,” a dramatic sketch, issued, with “Miscellaneous Poems,” in 1852.  Toward the end of this year, he completed “Leonor de Guzman.”

“Her history,” he writes to Stoddard, on November 14, “you will find in Spanish Chronicles relating to the reigns of Alfonso XII of Castile and his son, Peter the Cruel.  There are no such subjects for historical tragedy on earth as are to be found in the Spanish history of that period.  I am so much in love with it that I design following up ‘Leonor de Guzman’ by ‘Don Pedro’.  The present tragedy, according to the judgment of Leland, is the very