ised by
the lord chamberlain (to whom it had descended from the master of the
revels). The regular censorship which this act established has not
appreciably affected the literary progress of the English drama, and the
objections which have been raised against it seem to have addressed
themselves to practice rather than to principle. The liberty of the
stage is a question differing in its conditions from that of the liberty
of speech in general, or even from that of the liberty of the press; and
occasional lapses of official judgment weigh lightly in the balance
against the obvious advantages of a system which in a free country needs
only the vigilance of public opinion to prevent its abuse. The policy of
the restraint which the act of 1737 put upon the number of playhouses is
a different, but has long become an obsolete, question.[248]

Comedy in the latter half of the 18th century.

Brought back into its accustomed grooves, English comedy seemed inclined
to leave to farce the domain of healthy ridicule, and to coalesce with
domestic tragedy in the attempt to make the stage a vehicle of homespun
didactic morality. Farce had now become a genuine English species, and
has as such retained its vitality through all the subsequent fortunes of
the stage; it was actively cultivated by Garrick as both actor and
author; and he undoubtedly had more than a hand in the very best farce
of this age, which is ascribed to clerical authorship.[249] S. Foote,
whose comedies[250] and farces are distinguished both by wit and by
variety of characters (though it was an absurd misapplication of a great
name to call him the English Aristophanes), introduced into comic acting
the abuse of personal mimicry, for the exhibition of which he
ingeniously invented a series of entertainments, the parents of a long
progeny of imitations. Meanwhile, the domestic drama of the sentimental
kind achieved, though not immediately, a success only inferior to that
of _The London Merchant_, in _The Gamester_ of E. Moore, to which
Garrick seems to have directly contributed;[251] and sentimental comedy
courted sympathetic applause in the works of A. Murphy, the single
comedy of W. Whitehead,[252] and the earliest of H. Kelly.[153] It
cannot be said that this species was extinguished, as it is sometimes
assumed to have been, by O. Goldsmith; but he certainly published a
direct protest against it between the production of his admirable
character-comedy of _The Go