good play and after-piece were well represented to a house
which, from the little intermixture of the lovely sex, somewhat
resembled the auditory of a surgeon's dissecting theatre.

Mr. Morton's comedy "A Cure for the Heart Ach," is by this time so well
known that to relate the fable of it here, would be uselessly to
encumber the work. Of the quality of this production it would be
difficult for criticism to speak candidly, without adverting to the
present miserable state of dramatic poetry in England, which from the
days of Sam Foote has been gradually descending to its present
deplorable condition. The body of dramatic writers of the last thirty
years first corrupted the public taste, and now thrive by that
corruption. By hasty sketches, not of Nature as she appears in all times
and places, but of particular and eccentric manners and characters, the
excressences of overloaded society, they have made a short cut to the
favour of the public, and inundated the stage with a torrent of
ephemeral productions, to the depravation of public taste, and in
defiance of classical criticism: their highest praise that they do no
moral mischief, and that if they possess not the bold outline and
faithful colouring of nature which distinguished the productions of
their mighty predecessors, they are no less exempt from the obscenity
and immoral effects of those authors. As bad writing is infinitely
easier than good, the pens of our living dramatic writers in general
teem with an inconceivable fertility--and the purlieus of London are
beat over in every direction to hunt up game suitable to the genius of
their weak-winged muse; in short, to find out new modifications of
character, attractive not by its consonance to man's general nature, but
by its eccentricity and departure from the ordinary tracks of human
conduct.

Having thus insulated this class of comedies, and put them apart from
the old stock, to which, with the exception of the Honey Moon, there is
no modern production comparable, criticism may weigh the merits of each
piece as compared with its class, and perhaps find something to praise.
We consider some of the comedies of Mr. Morton, however, as raised high
above the throng. The Cure for the Heart Ach has much in it to commend.
The moral tendency of many parts of it is good, while the incidents are
exceedingly laughable. _Old Rapid_ continually betraying his trade by
stuffing his conversation with the technical terms of the