nd generously added a few
more murders, rapes, and parricides, to that charnel-house of
horrors[1]. His turn for comedy being at least equal to his success in
the blood-stained buskin, Mr Ravenscroft translated and mangled
several of the more farcical French comedies, which he decorated with
the lustre of his own great name. Amongst others which he thus
appropriated, were the most extravagant and buffoon scenes in
Moliere's "_Bourgeois Gentilhomme_;" in which Monsieur Jourdain is,
with much absurd ceremony, created a Turkish Paladin; and where
Moliere took the opportunity to introduce an _entree de ballet_,
danced and sung by the Mufti, dervises, and others, in eastern habits.
Ravenscroft's translation, entitled "The Citizen turned Gentleman,"
was acted in 1672, and printed in the same year; the jargon of the
songs, like similar nonsense of our own day, seems to have been well
received on the stage. Dryden, who was not always above feeling
indignation at the bad taste and unjust preferences of the age,
attacked Ravenscroft in the prologue to "The Assignation," as he had
before, though less directly, in that of "Marriage a-la-Mode." Hence
the exuberant and unrepressed joy of that miserable scribbler broke
forth upon the damnation of Dryden's performance, in the following
passage of a prologue to another of his pilfered performances, called
"The Careless Lovers," acted, according to Langbaine, in the vacation
succeeding the fall of "The Assignation," in 1673:

An author did, to please you, let his wit run,
Of late, much on a serving man and cittern;
And yet, you would not like the serenade,--
Nay, and you damned his nuns in masquerade:
You did his Spanish sing-song too abhor;
_Ah! que locura con tanto rigor!_
In fine, the whole by you so much was blamed,
To act their parts, the players were ashamed[2].
Ah, how severe your malice was that day!
To damn, at once, the poet and his play[3]:
But why was your rage just at that time shown,
When what the author writ was all his own?
Till then, he borrowed from romance, and did translate[4];
And those plays found a more indulgent fate.

Ravenscroft, however, seems to have given the first offence; for, in
the prologue to "The Citizen turned Gentleman," licensed 9th August
1672, we find the following lines, obviously levelled at "The Conquest
of Granada," and other heroic dramas of our author:

Then shall the knight, that had a knock in's cradle,