as also of the bustle
and intrigue, with which they are usually embroiled. Few modern
audiences would endure the absurd grossness of the deceit practised on
Lord Nonsuch in the fourth act; nor is the plot of Lady Constance, to
gain her lover, by marrying him in the disguise of a heathen divinity,
more grotesque than unnatural.--Yet, in the under characters, some
liveliness of dialogue is maintained; and the reader may be amused
with particular scenes, though, as a whole, the early fate of the play
was justly merited.

These passages, in which the plot stands still, while the spectators
are entertained with flippant dialogue and repartee, are ridiculed in
the scene betwixt Prince Prettyman and Tom Thimble in the Rehearsal;
the facetious Mr Bibber being the original of the latter personage.
The character of Trice, at least his whimsical humour of drinking,
playing at dice by himself, and quarrelling as if engaged with a
successful gamester, is imitated from the character of Carlo, in
Jonson's "Every Man out of his Humour," who drinks with a supposed
companion, quarrels about the pledge, and tosses about the cups and
flasks in the imaginary brawl. We have heard similar frolics related
of a bon-vivant of the last generation, inventor of a game called
_solitaire_, who used to complain of the hardship of drinking by
himself, because the _toast came too often about_.

The whole piece seems to have been intended as a sacrifice to popular
taste; and, perhaps, our poet only met a deserved fate, when he
stooped to sooth the depraved appetite, which his talents enabled him
to have corrected and purified. Something like this feeling may be
interred from the last lines of the second epilogue:

Would you but change, for serious plot and verse,
This motley garniture of fool and farce;
Nor scorn a mode, because 'tis taught at home,
Which dues, like vests,[A] our gravity become;
Our poet yields you should this play refuse,
As tradesmen by the change of fashions lose,
With some content, their fripperies of France,
In hope it may their staple trade advance.

[Footnote A: This seems to allude to the Polish dress, which, upon
his restoration, Charles wished to introduce into Britain. It was not
altered for the French, till his intimacy with that court was cemented
by pecuniary dependence.]

In the prologue, the author indulges himself in a display of the terms
of astrology, of which vain science he was a believer and a student.