age vow as a serious crime, or, if they
treat it as matter for laughter, turn the laugh against the gallant.

On the contrary, during the forty years which followed the Restoration,
the whole body of the dramatists invariably represent adultery, we do
not say as a peccadillo, we do not say as an error which the violence of
passion may excuse, but as the calling of a fine gentleman, as a grace
without which his character would be imperfect. It is as essential to
his breeding and to his place in society that he should make love to the
wives of his neighbors as that he should know French, or that he should
have a sword at his side. In all this there is no passion, and scarcely
anything that can be called preference. The hero intrigues just as he
wears a wig; because, if he did not, he would be a queer fellow, a city
prig, perhaps a Puritan. All the agreeable qualities are always given to
the gallant. All the contempt and aversion are the portion of the
unfortunate husband. Take Dryden for example; and compare Woodall with
Brainsick, or Lorenzo with Gomez. Take Wycherley; and compare Horner
with Pinchwife. Take Vanbrugh; and compare Constant with Sir John Brute.
Take Farquhar; and compare Archer with Squire Sullen. Take Congreve; and
compare Bellmour with Fondlewife, Careless with Sir Paul Plyant, or
Scandal with Foresight. In all these cases, and in many more which might
be named, the dramatist evidently does his best to make the person who
commits the injury graceful, sensible, and spirited, and the person who
suffers it a fool, or a tyrant, or both.

Mr. Charles Lamb, indeed, attempted to set up a defence for this way of
writing. The dramatists of the latter part of the seventeenth century
are not, according to him, to be tried by the standard of morality which
exists, and ought to exist, in real life. Their world is a conventional
world. Their heroes and heroines belong, not to England, not to
Christendom, but to an Utopia of gallantry, to a Fairyland, where the
Bible and Burn's Justice are unknown, where a prank which on this earth
would be rewarded with the pillory is merely matter for a peal of elvish
laughter. A real Horner, a real Careless, would, it is admitted, be
exceedingly bad men. But to predicate morality or immorality of the
Horner of Wycherley and the Careless of Congreve is as absurd as it
would be to arraign a sleeper for his dreams. "They belong to the
regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns.