into a moral world where it has
no business; from which it must needs fall head-long; as dizzy and
incapable of keeping its stand, as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has
wandered unawares within the sphere of one of his good men or angels.
But in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad?

The Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants, and Lady Touchwoods, in
their own sphere do not offend my moral sense--or, in fact, appeal
to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They break
through no laws, or conscientious restraints. They know of none. They
have got out of Christendom into the land--what shall I call it?--of
cuckoldry--the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the
manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of
things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is. No good
person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person
suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these
plays--the few exceptions only are _mistakes_--is alike essentially
vain and worthless. The great art of Congreve is especially shown in
this, that he has entirely excluded from his scenes,--some little
generosities in the part of Angelica perhaps excepted,--not only any
thing like a faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness
or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly, or
instinctively, the effect is as happy, as the design (if design) was
bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which his Way of the World
in particular possesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits
of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing--for you neither
hate nor love his personages--and I think it is owing to this very
indifference for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a
privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name
of palpable darkness, over his creations; and his shadows flit before
you without distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good
character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment
to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have
only lighted to the discovery of deformities, which now are none,
because we think them none.

Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend
Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets,--the business of
their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No
other spring of action, or