his beer-mugs, his wine-flagons, and his contemplation of ideal
Christianity, to find himself famous. He had opened a new vein of
satire, and a vein moreover which upheld virtue and laughed to scorn
hypocrisy and vice. That was a moral which the dramatists of his epoch
seldom taught.[A] And so the people crowded to the theatre, applauded
the sentiment of the play, guffawed at the keen wit of the dialogue,
and swore that this young rascal Steele was the prince of bright
fellows. Then they went home--and revelled, as before, in the funerals
of their friends.

[Footnote A: The "Funeral" is the merriest and most perfect of
Steele's comedies. The characters are strongly marked, the wit genial,
and not indecent. Steele was among the first who set about reforming
the licentiousness of the old comedy. His satire in the "Funeral" is
not against virtue, but vice and silliness.--DR. DORAN.]

What of this remarkable comedy? Its story turned upon the marriage of
the elderly Lord Brumpton to a designing young minx who estranges the
nobleman from his son, Lord Hardy, the gentlemanly, poverty-stricken
leading man of the piece. When Brumpton has a cataleptic fit, and is
apparently dead as a doornail, the spouse confides his body to the
undertaker with feelings of serene pleasure. But let the lines of the
play, or a portion thereof, unfold the situation.

The scene is at Lord Brumpton's house; the nobleman has just been
pronounced defunct, and Sable, the undertaker, has arrived. The
latter, who is being bantered by two of the characters, Mr. Campley
and Cabinet, is evidently a bit of a philosopher, albeit an uncanny
one, for he says:

* * * * *

"There are very few in the whole world that live to themselves, but
sacrifice their bosom-bliss to enjoy a vain show and appearance of
prosperity in the eyes of others; and there is often nothing more
inwardly distressed than a young bride in her glittering retinue, or
deeply joyful than a young widow in her weeds and black train; of both
which the lady of this house may be an instance, for she has been the
one, and is, I'll be sworn, the other.

"CABINET. You talk, Mr. Sable, most learnedly.

"SABLE. I have the deepest learning, sir, experience; remember your
widow cousin, that married last month.

"CABINET. Ay, but how you'd you imagine she was in all that grief
an hypocrite! Could all those shrieks, those swoonings, that rising
falling bosom, be constra