heard so much to know the Marquis to be a villain. [Knocking.] Nay, then, I must run for't. [Runs out and returns.] The entry is stopped by a chair coming in; and something there is in that chair that I will discover, if I can find a place to hide myself. [Goes to the closet door.] Fast! I have keys about me for most locks about St. James's. Let me see. [Tries one key.] No, no; this opens my Lady Planthorn's back-door. [Tries another.] Nor this; this is the key to my Lady Stakeall's garden. [Tries a third.] Ay, ay, this does it, faith. [Goes into the closet.]

The dialogue between Cherry and Archer, in 'The Beaux' Stratagem,' in which she repeats her well-conned love catechism, is as good as this, but not so fit to be repeated anywhere but on the stage. 'The Beaux' Stratagem' is the best of his plays as a whole; infinitely lively, bustling, and full of point and interest.

The assumed disguise of the two principal characters, Archer and Aimwell, is a perpetual amusement to the mind. Scrub is an indispensable appendage to a country gentleman's kitchen, and an exquisite confidant for the secrets of young ladies. 'The Recruiting Officer' is not one of Farquhar's best comedies, though it is light and entertaining. It contains chiefly sketches and hints of characters, and the conclusion of the plot is rather lame. He informs us, in the dedication to the published play, that it was founded on some local and personal circumstances that happened in Shropshire, where he was himself a recruiting officer; and it seems not unlikely that most of the scenes actually took place at the foot of the Wrekin. 'The Inconstant' is much superior to it. The romantic interest and impressive catastrophe of this play, I thought, had been borrowed from the more poetical and tragedy-practised muse of Beaumont and Fletcher; but I find they are taken from an actual circumstance which took place in the author's knowledge, at Paris. His other pieces, 'Love and a Bottle,' and 'The Twin Rivals,' are not on a par with these, and no longer in possession of the stage. The public are, after all, not the worst judges. Farquhar's 'Letters,' prefixed to the collection of his plays, are lively, goodhumoured, and sensible, and contain, among other things, an admirable exposition of the futility of the dramatic unities of time and place.

This criticism preceded Dennis's remarks on that subject, in

his strictures on Mr. Addison's 'Cato,' and completely anticipates all that Dr. Johnson has urged so unanswerably on the subject in his preface to Shakspeare.

We may

of Farquhar.

date the decline of English comedy from the time

For this several causes might be assigned in the political and moral changes of the times; but, among other minor ones, Jeremy Collier, in his 'View of the English Stage,' frightened the poets, and did all he could to spoil the stage by pretending to reform it; that is, by making it an echo of the pulpit, instead of a reflection of the manners of the world. He complains bitterly of the profaneness of the stage; and is for fining the actors for every oath they utter, to put an end to the practice; as if common swearing had been an invention of the poets and stageplayers. He cannot endure that the fine gentlemen drink, and the fine ladies intrigue, in the scenes of Congreve and Wycherley, when things so contrary to law and gospel happened nowhere else. He is vehement against duelling, as a barbarous custom, of which the example is suffered with impunity nowhere but on the stage. He is shocked at the number of for⚫tunes that are irreparably ruined by the vice of gaming on the boards of the theatres. He seems to think that every breach of the ten commandments begins and ends there. He complains that the tame husbands of his time are laughed at on the stage, and that the successful gallants triumph, which was without precedent either in the city or the court. He does not think it enough that the stage "shows vice its own image, scorn its own feature," unless they are damned at the same instant, and carried off (like Don Juan) by real devils to the infernal regions, before the faces of the spectators. It seems that the author would have been contented to be present at a comedy or a farce, like a Father Inquisitor, if there was to be an auto da fé at the end, to burn both the actors and the poet. This sour, nonjuring critic has a great horror and repugnance at poor human nature in nearly all its shapes, of the existence of which he appears only to be aware through the stage: and this he considers as the only exception to the practice of piety, and the performance of the whole duty of man; and seems fully convinced, that if this nuisance

were abated, the whole world would be regulated according to the creed and the catechism.-This is a strange blindness and infatuation! He forgets, in his over-heated zeal, two things: First, that the stage must be copied from real life, that the manners represented there must exist elsewhere, and "denote a foregone conclusion," to satisfy common sense.-Secondly, that the stage cannot shock common decency, according to the notions that prevail of it in any age or country, because the exhibition is public. If the pulpit, for instance, had banished all vice and imperfection from the world, as our critic would suppose, we should not have seen the offensive reflection of them on the stage, which he resents as an affront to the cloth, and an outrage on religion. On the contrary, with such a sweeping reformation as this theory implies, the office of the preacher, as well as of the player, would be gone; and if the common peccadillos of lying, swearing, intriguing, fighting, drinking, gaming, and other such obnoxious dramatic common-places, were once fairly got rid of in reality, neither the comic poet would be able to laugh at them on the stage, nor our good-natured author to consign them over to damnation elsewhere. The work is, however, written with ability, and did much mischief: it produced those. do-me-good, lack-a-daisical, whining, make-believe comedies in the next age, (such as Steele's 'Conscious Lovers,' and others,) which are enough to set one to sleep, and where the author tries in vain to be merry and wise in the same breath; in which the utmost stretch of licentiousness goes no farther than the gallant's being suspected of keeping a mistress, and the highest proof of courage is given in his refusing to accept a challenge.

In looking into the old editions of the comedies of the last age, I find the names of the best actors of those times, of whom scarcely any record is left but in Colley Cibber's Life, and the monument to Mrs. Oldfield in Westminster Abbey; which Voltaire reckons among the proofs of the liberality, wisdom, and politeness of the English nation :

:

"Let no rude hand deface it,

And its forlorn hic jacet."

Authors after their deaths live in their works: players only in their epitaphs and the breath of common tradition. They “die and leave the world no copy." Their uncertain popularity is as short-lived as it is dazzling, and in a few years nothing is known of them but that they were.

LECTURE V.

On the Periodical Essayists.

"The proper study of mankind is mun."

I Now come to speak of that sort of writing which has been so successfully cultivated in this country by our periodical Essayists, and which consists in applying the talents and resources of the mind to all that mixed mass of human affairs, which, though not included under the head of any regular art, science, or profession, falls under the cognizance of the writer, and "comes home to the business and bosoms of men." Quicquid agunt homines nostri farrago libelli, is the general motto of this department of literature. It does not treat of minerals or fossils, of the virtues of plants, or the influence of planets; it does not meddle with forms of belief, or systems of philosophy, nor launch into the world of spiritual existences; but it makes familiar with the world of men and women, records their actions, assigns their motives, exhibits their whims, characterizes their pursuits in all their singular and endless variety, ridicules their absurdities, exposes their inconsistencies, "holds the mirror up to nature, and shows the very age and body of the time, its form and pressure ;" takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shows us what we are, and what we are not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened spectators of its many-coloured scenes, enables us (if possible) to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to perform a part. "The act and practic part of life is thus made the mistress of our theorique." It is the best and most natural course of study. It is in morals and manners what the experimental is in natural philosophy, as opposed to the dogmatical method. It does not deal in sweeping clauses of proscription and anathema, but in nice distinctions and liberal