d Richardson has
strengthened Vice, from the mouth of Lovelace, with entangling
sophistries and abstruse pleas against her adversary Virtue, which
Sedley, Villiers, and Rochester wanted depth of libertinism enough to
have invented.

[Footnote 1: Error, entering into the world with Sin among us poor
Adamites, may be said to spring from the tree of knowledge itself,
and from the rotten kernels of that fatal apple.--_Howell's
Letters_.]

* * * * *

THOMAS DECKER.

_Old Fortunatus_.--The humor of a frantic lover in the scene where
Orleans to his friend Galloway defends the passion with which
himself, being a prisoner in the English king's court, is enamored to
frenzy of the king's daughter Agripyna, is done to the life. Orleans
is as passionate an inamorato as any which Shakspeare ever drew. He
is just such another adept in Love's reasons. The sober people of the
world are with him,

"A swarm of fools
Crowding together to be counted wise."

He talks "pure Biron and Romeo;" he is almost as poetical as they,
quite as philosophical, only a little madder. After all, Love's
sectaries are a reason unto themselves. We have gone retrograde to
the noble heresy, since the days when Sidney proselyted our nation to
this mixed health and disease: the kindliest symptom, yet the most
alarming crisis, in the ticklish state of youth; the nourisher and
the destroyer of hopeful wits; the mother of twin births, wisdom and
folly, valor and weakness; the servitude above freedom; the gentle
mind's religion; the liberal superstition.

_The Honest Whore_.--There is in the second part of this play, where
Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her
profession, a simple picture of honor and shame, contrasted without
violence, and expressed without immodesty; which is worth all the
_strong lines_ against the harlot's profession, with which both parts
of this play are offensively crowded. A satirist is always to be
suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and
minutest circumstances with a sort of relish and retrospective
fondness. But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective,
that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer
against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his
unregenerate state served but to inflame his appetites, in his new
province of a moralist will serve him, a little turned, to expos