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EDWARD A. PARRY.

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Ah! let not censure term our fate our choice,

The stage but echoes back the public voice;

The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give,

For we that live to please must please to live.

—Samuel Johnson.

I have a vague notion that I wrote this paper on the Box Office in some former existence in the eighteenth century, and that it was entitled ‘The Box Office in relation to the Drama of Human Life,’ and that it was printed in the Temple of the Muses which was, if I remember, in Finsbury Square.

But it is quite worth writing again with a snappy, up-to-date modern title, and in a snappier, more up-to-date and modern spirit, for as I discovered, to my surprise, in talking the other day to a meeting of serious playgoers, the Box Office idea is as little understood to-day as ever it was. All great first principles want re-stating every now and then, and the Box Office principle is one of them, for, like many of the great natural forces which govern human action, it seems to be entirely unappreciated and misunderstood.