connection with one of the
theatres. Instead he appeared now here now there for brief engagements or
on special occasions, rather than as a regular member of the company,
often carrying his plays with him. Thus a number have survived only in
manuscript. The Larpent Collection contains seven,--the tragedy just
mentioned, four farces, and two five-act comedies, one of these in three
states.[1] This is _The Man of the World_ here reproduced for the first
time in over a century and a half, despite the opinion expressed by Isaac
Reed, in 1782, that "This play, ... in respect to originality, force of
mind, and well-adapted satire, may dispute the palm with any dramatic
piece that has appeared within the compass of half a century...."[2]
Originally it had been performed in Dublin in 1764 under the title _The
True-born Scotchman_, but in 1770 the Examiner of Plays in London refused
to license it. It was re-submitted in 1779 and again forbidden, but was
finally allowed and performed at Covent Garden on 10 May 1781, with the
author in the part of Sir Pertinax Macsycophant.

Himself irascible and passionate, Macklin had been the most admired
Shylock of his century. His specialty was the performance of character
parts, often dialect roles, either broadly comic or cruel and ironic. The
central figure of this, his best comedy, is such a part. It combines those
features that the author could portray so effectively, the broad dialect,
the callous selfishness, the hypocrisy, the passionate resistance to all
appeals to sentiment and the imperviousness to affection. One can detect
in the creation strong resemblances to Macklin's interpretation of
Shylock, something of Sir Giles Overreach, who was also known to
eighteenth-century play-goers, and possibly of Tartuffe. In his resolute
defiance of the conventions of comedy of sensibility, Macklin resisted the
pressure to allow Sir Pertinax to soften in the end and terminate the play
on a note of happy reconciliation and family harmony.

In thus preserving the toughness of Sir Pertinax consistently to the end,
Macklin remained true to the tradition of critical, satiric comedy that he
had been bred in but that by this time had almost disappeared. Protesting
against the refusal of a license for his play, in 1779, Macklin composed a
defense of satiric comedy. He insists upon the reformatory function of
comedy and upon the satiric method of performing this task. "The business
of the Stage," he sa