dark lanthorn, that it may be secret; and Juno shall give
her peacock poppy-water, that he may fold his ogling tail, and Argus's
hundred eyes be shut, ha? Nobody shall know, but Jeremy.'

TATTLE. Do you know me, Valentine?

VALENTINE. You? Who are you? No, I hope not.

TATTLE. I am Jack Tattle, your friend.

VALENTINE. My friend, what to do? I am no married man, and thou
canst not lie with my wife. I am very poor, and thou canst not borrow
money of me. Then, what employment have I for a friend?

ANGELICA. Do you know me, Valentine?

VALENTINE. Oh, very well.

ANGELICA. Who am I?

VALENTINE. You're a woman, one to whom Heaven gave beauty when it
grafted roses on a briar. You are the reflection of Heaven in a pond,
and he that leaps at you is sunk. You are all white, a sheet of
lovely, spotless paper, when you first are born; but you are to be
scrawled and blotted by every goose's quill. I know you; for I loved
a woman, and loved her so long, that I found out a strange thing: I
found out what a woman was good for.

Imagine Betterton, the greatest actor of his time, delivering that last
speech, with its incomparable rhythm! I like to think that he gave the
spectators an idea that Valentine's self-sacrifice for Angelica was
nothing but a bold device, a calculated effect; otherwise the sacrifice
is an excrescence in this comedy, which, popular and broad though it be,
is cynical in Congreve's manner throughout. One is consoled, however, by
the pleasant fate of the ingenious Mr. Tattle and the intriguing Mrs.
Frail, who are left tied for life against their will. The trick, by the
way, of a tricked marriage is constant in Congreve, and reveals his
poverty of construction. He can devise you comic situations
unflaggingly, but when he approaches the end of a play his _deus ex
machina_ is invariably this flattest and most battered old deity in
fairyland.

The dedication to Lord Dorset contains nothing of interest beyond the
confession that the play is too long, and the information that part of it
was omitted in the playing. A line in the prologue, 'We grieve One
falling Adam and one tempted Eve,' is explained by Colley Cibber to refer
to Mrs. Mountford, who, having cast her lot with Betterton and migrated
to Lincoln's Inn Fields, threw up her part on a question of cash, and to
Williams, an actor who 'loved his bottle better than his business,' who
de