rawing-rooms at the time of the Restoration:

"You criticks, said Selinda, make a mighty sputter about exactness of
plot, unity of time, place and I know not what, which I can never find
do any play the least good (Peregrine smiled at her female ignorance).
But, she continued, I have one thing to offer in this dispute, which I
think sufficient to convince you. I suppose the chief design of plays is
to please the people,[361] and get the playhouse and poet a livelihood?

"You must pardon me, madam, replyed Peregrine, Instruction is the
business of plays.

"Sir, said the lady, make it the business of the audience first to be
pleased with instruction, and then I shall allow you it to be the chief
end of plays.

"But, suppose, madam, said he, that I grant what you lay down.

"Then sir, answered she, you must allow that whatever plays most exactly
answer this aforesaid end are most exact plays. Now I can instance you
many plays, as all those by Shakespeare and Johnson, and the most of Mr.
Dryden's which you criticks quarrel at as irregular, which nevertheless
still continue to please the audience and are a continual support to the
Theatre. There is very little of your unity of time in any of them, yet
they never fail to answer the proposed end very successfully....
Certainly, these rules are ill understood, or our nature has changed
since they were made, for we find they have no such effects now as they
had formerly. For instance, I am told the 'Double Dealer' and 'Plot and
no Plot' are two very exact plays, as you call them, yet all their unity
of time, place and action neither pleased the audience nor got the poets
money. A late play called 'Beauty in distress,'[362] in which the author
no doubt sweat as much in confining the whole play to one scene, as the
scene-drawers should, were it to be changed a hundred times, this play
had indeed a commendatory copy from Mr. Dryden, but I think he had
better have altered the scene and pleased the audience; in short, had
these plays been a little more exact as you call it, they had all been
exactly damn'd."

Further, some traits of character almost worthy of Fielding are to be
remarked in the course of the tale, though, it is true, it grows
confused towards the end, and touches the melodramatic in the same way
as Nash's novel. Thus the above conversation is interrupted by the
entrance of the coquette Emilia, long before loved by Peregrine who had
vainly asked for her hand. "Pe