defended them by the
ingenious sophistries which it has pleased later literary criticism to
suggest on their behalf, now began with uneasy merriment to allude in
their prologues to the reformation which had come over the spirit of the
town. Writers like Mrs Centlivre became anxious to reclaim their
offenders with much emphasis in the fifth act; and Colley Cibber--whose
_Apology for his Life_ furnishes a useful view of this and the
subsequent period of the history of the stage, with which he was
connected as author, manager and actor (excelling in this capacity as
representative of those fools with which he peopled the comic
stage)[232]--may be credited with having first deliberately made the
pathetic treatment of a moral sentiment the basis of the action of a
comic drama. But he cannot be said to have consistently pursued the vein
which in his _Careless Husband_ (1704) he had essayed. His _Non-Juror_
is a political adaptation of _Tartuffe_; and his almost equally
celebrated _Provoked Husband_ only supplied a happy ending to Vanbrugh's
unfinished play. Sir R. Steele, in accordance with his general
tendencies as a writer, pursued a still more definite moral purpose in
his comedies; but his genius perhaps lacked the sustained vigour
necessary for a dramatist, and his humour naturally sought the aid of
pathos. From partial[233] he passed to more complete[234] experiment;
and thus these two writers, who transplanted to the comic stage a
tendency towards the treatment of domestic themes noticeable in such
writers of Restoration tragedy as Southerne and Rowe, became the
founders of _sentimental comedy_, a species which exercised a most
depressing influence upon the progress of English drama, and helped to
hasten the decline of its comic branch. With _Cato_ English tragedy
committed suicide, though its pale ghost survived; with _The Conscious
Lovers_ English comedy sank for long into the tearful embraces of
artificiality and weakness.

The drama and stage in the period before Garrick.

Garrick.

During the 18th century the productions of dramatic literature were
still as a rule legitimately designed to meet the demands of the stage,
from which its higher efforts afterwards to so large an extent became
dissociated. The goodwill of most sections of the public continued to be
steadily accorded to a theatre which had ceased to defy the accepted
laws and traditions of morality; and the opposition still aroused by it
was c