ight
as well carry cannon on a racing-yacht. Morality is a duenna to be
circumvented. This was the view of English Comedy of a sagacious
essayist, who said that the end of a Comedy would often be the
commencement of a Tragedy, were the curtain to rise again on the
performers. In those old days female modesty was protected by a fan,
behind which, and it was of a convenient semicircular breadth, the
ladies present in the theatre retired at a signal of decorum, to peep,
covertly askant, or with the option of so peeping, through a prettily
fringed eyelet-hole in the eclipsing arch.

'Ego limis specto sic per flabellum clanculum.'-TERENCE.

That fan is the flag and symbol of the society giving us our so-called
Comedy of Manners, or Comedy of the manners of South-sea Islanders under
city veneer; and as to Comic idea, vacuous as the mask without the face
behind it.

Elia, whose humour delighted in floating a galleon paradox and wafting
it as far as it would go, bewails the extinction of our artificial
Comedy, like a poet sighing over the vanished splendour of Cleopatra's
Nile-barge; and the sedateness of his plea for a cause condemned even in
his time to the penitentiary, is a novel effect of the ludicrous. When
the realism of those 'fictitious half-believed personages,' as he
calls them, had ceased to strike, they were objectionable company,
uncaressable as puppets. Their artifices are staringly naked, and have
now the effect of a painted face viewed, after warm hours of dancing,
in the morning light. How could the Lurewells and the Plyants ever have
been praised for ingenuity in wickedness? Critics, apparently sober,
and of high reputation, held up their shallow knaveries for the world
to admire. These Lurewells, Plyants, Pinchwifes, Fondlewifes, Miss Prue,
Peggy, Hoyden, all of them save charming Milamant, are dead as last
year's clothes in a fashionable fine lady's wardrobe, and it must be an
exceptionably abandoned Abigail of our period that would look on them
with the wish to appear in their likeness. Whether the puppet show of
Punch and Judy inspires our street-urchins to have instant recourse to
their fists in a dispute, after the fashion of every one of the actors
in that public entertainment who gets possession of the cudgel, is open
to question: it has been hinted; and angry moralists have traced
the national taste for tales of crime to the smell of blood in our
nursery-songs. It will at any rate hardly be questi