r wit; so that the
playwrights were in some measure following nature--that very small
corner of nature which they called "the town"--in accepting and making a
law of the Elizabethan convention. The leading characters of Restoration
comedy, from Etherege to Vanbrugh, are consciously and almost
professionally wits. Simile and repartee are as indispensable a part of
a gentleman's social outfit as his wig or his rapier. In Congreve the
word "wit" is almost as common as the thing. When Farquhar made some
movement towards a return to nature, he was rewarded with Pope's line,
which clings like a burr to his memory--

"What pert, low dialogue has Farquhar writ."

If eighteenth-century comedy, as a whole, is not brilliantly written, it
is for lack of talent in the playwrights, not for lack of desire or
intention. Goldsmith, like Farquhar and Steele, vaguely realized the
superiority of humour to wit; but he died too early to exercise much
influence on his successors. In Sheridan the convention of wit
reasserted itself triumphantly, and the scene in which Lady Teazle, Mrs.
Candour, and the rest of the scandalous college sit in a semicircle and
cap malicious similes, came to be regarded as an unapproachable model of
comedy dialogue. The convention maintained itself firmly down to the
days of _Money_ and _London Assurance_, the dullness of the intervening
period being due, not to any change of theory, but to sheer impotence of
practice. T.W. Robertson, as above mentioned, attempted a return to
nature, with occasional and very partial success; but wit, with a dash
of fanciful sentiment, reasserted itself in James Albery; while in H.J.
Byron it degenerated into mere punning and verbal horse-play. I should
not be surprised if the historian of the future were to find in the
plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the first marked symptoms of a
reaction--of a tendency to reject extrinsic and fanciful ornament in
dialogue, and to rely for its effect upon its vivid appropriateness to
character and situation. In the early plays of Sir Arthur Pinero there
is a great deal of extrinsic ornament; especially of that
metaphor-hunting which was one of the characteristic forms of euphuism.
Take this, for example, from _The Profligate_. Dunstan Renshaw has
expressed to Hugh Murray the opinion that "marriages of contentment are
the reward of husbands who have taken the precaution to sow their wild
oats rather thickly"; whereupon the Scotch solicitor repli