ain a half-truth. The idea of _The Way of the World's_ reforming
adulterers--observe the quotation from Horace on the title-page--is a
little delicious; yet the exhibition in a ludicrous light of the thing
satirised is surely an end of satiric comedy? The right of the matter is
indicated in a sentence which occurs in the dedication of _The Double-
Dealer_ far more wisely than in Congreve's answer to Collier: 'I should
be very glad of an opportunity to make my compliment to those ladies who
are offended: but they can no more expect it in a comedy, than to be
tickled by a surgeon, when he's letting 'em blood.' Something more than
a half-truth is in Charles Lamb's theory, that the old comedy 'has no
reference whatever to the world that is': that it is 'the Utopia of
Gallantry' merely. Literally, historically, the theory is a fantasy.
What the Restoration dramatists did not borrow from France was inspired
directly by the court of Charles the Second, and nobody conversant with
the memoirs of that court can have any difficulty in matching the fiction
with reality. I imagine that Congreve in part accepted a tradition of
the stage, but I am also perfectly well assured that he depicted what he
saw. How far the virtues we should associate with the Charles the Second
spirit may atone for its vices is a question which would take us far into
moral philosophy. It is enough to remark that those vices are the
exclusive possession of no period: so long as society is constituted in
anything like its present order, there must be a section of it for which
those vices are the main interest in life. But Charles Lamb's gay and
engaging defiance of the kill-joys of his day has this value: it is most
certainly just to say that, in appreciating satiric comedy, 'our
coxcombical moral sense' must be 'for a little transitory ease excluded.'

For one may apprehend the whole truth to be somewhat thus. Satiric
comedy, or comedy of manners, is the art of making ludicrous in dramatic
form some phase of life. The writers of our old comedy thought that
certain vices--gambling, adultery, and the like--formed a phase of life
which for divers reasons, essential and accidental, lent itself best to
their purpose. They may, or may not, have thought they were doing
society a service: their real justification is that, as artists, they had
to take for their art that material they could use best. They used it
according to their lights: Wycherley with a co