ght"
prevented him from including. O'Keefe was to a certain extent a follower
of Foote; but his pieces--though he was a practised actor--depended less
upon his own powers of exposition than Foote's. They range from rather
farcical comedies to pure farces and comediettas much interspersed with
songs for music; and their strictly literary merit is not often great,
while for sheer extravagance they require the utmost license of the
boards to excuse them. There is, however, something much more taking in
them than in most of the dramatic work of the time. For instance, the
"wild farce" (referred to but not named by Lamb in his paper on Munden)
of _The Merry Mourners_, though as "improbable" as Mrs. Barbauld thought
_The Ancient Mariner_ to be, has a singular hustle and bustle of
sustained interest, and not a few shrewd strokes such as the following,
which perhaps does not only apply to the end of the _eighteenth_
century. "Your London ladies are so mannified with their switch rattans
and coats, and watch-chain nibbities, and their tip-top hats and their
cauliflower cravats, that, ecod! there's no mark of their being women
except the petticoat." _The Castle of Andalusia_ (1782) is an early and
capital example of the bandit drama, and _The Poor Soldier_ of the Irish
comic opera. _Wild Oats_ supplied favourite parts to the actors of the
time in Rover and Ephraim Smooth; and, with a little good will, one may
read even slight things like _A Beggar on Horseback_ and _The Doldrum_
with some amusement. But O'Keefe has few gifts beyond knowledge of the
stage, Irish shrewdness, Irish rattle, and an honest, straightforward
simplicity; and that one turns to him from other dramatists of the
period with some relief, is even more to their discredit than to his
credit.

A curious and early fruit of this gradual divorce between drama and
literature was Joanna Baillie, a lady whose virtues, amiability, and in
a way talents, caused her to be spoken of by her own contemporaries with
an admiration which posterity has found it hard to echo as concerns her
strictly literary position in drama--some of her shorter poems were
good. She was born in 1762 at Bothwell, of a good Scotch family, and her
mother was a sister of the great surgeon Hunter. This gift descended to
her elder brother Matthew, who was very famous in his own day as an
anatomist and physician. Partly to be near him, Joanna and her sister
Agnes established themselves at Hampstead, wher