----reserved for London
trades-people. A man must be either a rake or a hypocrite. The gentlemen
were rakes, the city people were hypocrites. Their wives, however, were
all in love with the gentlemen, and it was the proper thing to seduce
them, and to borrow their husbands' money. For the first and last time,
perhaps, in the history of the English drama, the sympathy of the
audience was deliberately sought for the seducer and the rogue, and the
laugh turned against the dishonored husband and the honest man.
(Contrast this with Shakspere's _Merry Wives of Windsor_.) The women
were represented as worse than the men--scheming, ignorant, and corrupt.
The dialogue in the best of these plays was easy, lively, and witty the
situations in some of them audacious almost beyond belief. Under a thin
varnish of good breeding, the sentiments and manners were really brutal.
The loosest gallants of Beaumont and Fletcher's theater retain a
fineness of feeling and that _politesse de caeur_ which marks the
gentleman. They are poetic creatures, and own a capacity for romantic
passion. But the Manlys and Horners of the Restoration comedy have a
prosaic, cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts.

Charles Lamb, in his ingenious essay on "The Artificial Comedy of the
Last Century," apologized for the Restoration stage, on the ground that
it represented a world of whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws
of morality had no application. But Macaulay answered truly, that at no
time has the stage been closer in its imitation of real life. The
theater of Wycherley and Etherege was but the counterpart of that social
condition which we read of in Pepys's _Diary_, and in the _Memoirs_ of
the Chevalier de Grammont. This prose comedy of manners was not, indeed,
"artificial" at all, in the sense in which the contemporary tragedy--the
"heroic play"--was artificial. It was, on the contrary, far more
natural, and, intellectually, of much higher value. In 1698 Jeremy
Collier, a non-juring Jacobite clergyman, published his _Short View of
the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage_, which did much
toward reforming the practice of the dramatists. The formal
characteristics, without the immorality, of the Restoration comedy
re-appeared briefly in Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, 1772, and
Sheridan's _Rivals_, _School for Scandal_, and _Critic_, 1775-9; our
last strictly "classical" comedies. None of this school of English
comedians approached thei