beautifully clothed, suggest only sensual thoughts--nay,
the very modesty of the garments makes them the more insidious--the more
dangerous. I would rather give my boy Jonson, Massinger, or Beaumont and
Fletcher, whose very improper things 'are called by their proper names,'
than let him dive in the prurient innuendo of these later writers.

But there is no need to argue the question--the public has decided it
long since, and, except in indelicate ballets, and occasional rather
_French_ passages in farce, our modern stage is free from immorality.
Even in Garrick's days, when men were not much more refined than in
those of Queen Anne, it was found impossible to put the old drama on the
stage without considerable weeding. Indeed I doubt if even the liberal
upholder of Paul de Kock would call Congreve a moral writer; but I
confess I am not a competent judge, for _risum teneatis_, my critics, I
have not read his works since I was a boy, and what is more, I have no
intention of reading them. I well remember getting into my hands a large
thick volume, adorned with miserable woodcuts, and bearing on its back
the title 'Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar.' I devoured it
at first with the same avidity with which one might welcome a
bottle-imp, who at the hour of one's dulness turned up out of the carpet
and offered you delights new and old for nothing but a tether on your
soul: and with a like horror, boy though I was, I recoiled from it when
any better moment came. It seemed to me, when I read this book, as if
life were too rotten for any belief, a nest of sharpers, adulterers,
cut-throats, and prostitutes. There was none--as far as I remember--of
that amiable weakness, of that better sentiment, which in Ben Jonson or
Massinger reconcile us to human nature. If truth be a test of genius, it
must be a proof of true poetry, that man is not made uglier than he is.
Nay, his very ugliness loses its intensity and palls upon our diseased
tastes, for want of some goodness, some purity and honesty to relieve
it. I will not say that there is none of this in Congreve. I only know,
that my recollection of his plays is like that of a vile nightmare,
which I would not for anything have return to me. I have read, since,
books as bad, perhaps worse in some respects, but I have found the
redemption here and there. I would no more place Shandy in any boy's
hands than Congreve and Farquhar; and yet I can read Tristram again and
again with