false maxims of morality, and settle accounts fairly and satisfactorily between theory and practice. Her lover, Colonel Standard, is indeed an awkward incumbrance upon so fine a lady; it was a character that the poet did not like; and he has merely sketched him in, leaving him to answer for himself as well as he could, which is but badly. We have no suspicion, either from his conduct, or from any hint dropped by accident, that he is the first seducer and the possessor of the virgin affections of Lady Lurewell. The double transformation of his virago from vice to virtue, and from virtue to vice again, her plausible pretensions and artful wiles, her violent temper and dissolute passions, show a thorough knowledge of the effects both of nature and habit in making up human character. Farquhar's own heedless turn for gallantry would be likely to throw him upon such a character; and his goodness of heart and sincerity of disposition would teach him to expose its wanton duplicity and gilded rottenness. Lurewell is almost as abandoned a character as Olivia, in 'The Plain Dealer;' but the indignation excited against her is of a less serious and tragic cast. Her peevish disgust and affected horror at everything that comes near her, form a very edifying picture. Her dissatisfaction and ennui are not mere airs and graces worn for fashion's sake, but are real and tormenting inmates of her breast, arising from a surfeit of pleasure and the consciousness of guilt. All that is hateful in the caprice, ill humour, spite, hauteur, folly, impudence, and affectation of the complete woman of quality, is contained in the scene between her and her servants in the first act. The depravity would be intolerable, even in imagination, if the weakness were not ludicrous in the extreme. It shows, in the highest degree, the power of circumstances and example to pervert the understanding, the imagination, and even the senses. The manner in which the character of the gay, wild, free-hearted, but not altogether profligate or unfeeling Sir Harry Wildair, is played off against the designing, vindictive, imperious, uncontrollable, and unreasonable humours of Lurewell, in the scene where she tries to convince him of his wife's infidelity, while he stops his ears to her pretended proofs, is not surpassed in modern comedy. I shall give it here :— Wildair. Now, dear Madam, I have secured my brother, you have disposed of the Colonel, and we'll rail at love till we ha'n't a word more to say. Lurewell. Ay, Sir Harry. Please to sit a little, Sir. I'm in a strange humour of asking you some questions. your Lady, pray, Sir? You must know How did you like Wild. Like her! Ha, ha, ha! So very well, faith, that for her very sake I'm in love with every woman I meet. Lure. And did matrimony please you extremely? Wild. So very much, that if polygamy were allowed I would have a new wife every day. Lure. Oh, Sir Harry! this is raillery. But your serious thoughts upon the matter, pray. Wild. Why then, Madam, to give you my true sentiments of wedlock: I had a lady that I married by chance she was virtuous by chanceand I loved her by great chance. Nature gave her beauty, education an air; and fortune threw a young fellow, five-and-twenty, in her lap. I courted her all day, loved her all night; she was my mistress one day and my wife another; I found in one the variety of a thousand, and the very confinement of marriage gave me the pleasure of change. Lure. And she was very virtuous. Wild. Look ye, Madam, you know she was beautiful. She had good nature about her mouth, the smile of beauty in her cheeks, sparkling wit in her forehead, and sprightly love in her eyes. Lure. Pshaw! I knew her very well; the woman was well enough. But you don't answer my question, Sir. Wild. So, Madam, as I told you before, she was young and beautiful, I was rich and vigorous; my estate gave a lustre to my love, and a swing to our enjoyment; round, like the ring that made us one, our golden pleasures circled without end. Lure. Golden pleasures! Golden fiddlesticks! What dy'e tell me of your canting stuff? Was she virtuous, I say? Wild. Ready to burst with envy; but I will torment thee a little [Aside.] So, Madam, I powdered to please her, she dressed to engage me; we toyed away the morning in amorous nonsense, lolled away the evening in the park or the playhouse, and all the night-hem! Lure. Look ye, Sir, answer my question, or I shall take it ill. Wild. Then, Madam, there was never such a pattern of unity. Her wants were still prevented by my supplies; my own heart whispered me her desires, 'cause she herself was there; no contention ever rose, but the dear strife of who should most oblige; no noise about authority; for neither would stoop to command, 'cause both thought it glory to obey. Lure. Stuff! stuff! stuff! I won't believe a word on't. Wild. Ha, ha, ha! Then, Madam, we never felt the yoke of matrimony, because our inclinations made us one-a power superior to the forms of wedlock. The marriage torch had lost its weaker light in the bright flame of mutual love that joined our hearts before; then Lure. Hold, hold, Sir; I cannot bear it, Sir Harry, I'm affronted. Lure. Yes, Sir; 'tis an affront to any woman to hear another commended, and I will resent it. In short, Sir Harry, your wife was a Wild. Buz, Madam-no detraction. I'll tell you what she was. So much an angel in her conduct, that though I saw another in her arms, I should have thought the devil had raised the phantom, and my more conscious reason had given my eyes the lie. Lure. Very well! then I a'n't to be believed, it seems. But, d'ye hear, Sir! Wild. Nay, Madam, do you hear! I tell you 'tis not in the power of malice to cast a blot upon her fame; and though the vanity of our sex, and the envy of yours, conspired both against her honour, I would not hear a syllable. [Stopping his ears.] Lure. Why then, as I hope to breathe, you shall hear it. The picture! the picture! the picture! [Bawling aloud.] Wild. Ran, tan, tan. A pistol-bullet from ear to ear. Lure. That picture which you had just now from the French Marquis for a thousand pounds; that very picture did your very virtuous wife send to the Marquis as a pledge of her very virtuous and dying affection. So that you are both robbed of your honour and cheated of your money. [Loud.] Wild. Louder, louder, Madam. Lure. I tell you, Sir, your wife was a jilt; I know it, I'll swear it. She virtuous! she was a devil! Lure. Was ever the like seen! He won't hear me. I burst with Won't you hear me yet? malice, and now he won't mind me! Wild. No, no, Madam! Lure. Nay, then I can't bear it. [Bursts out a crying.] Sir, I must say that you're an unworthy person, to use a woman of quality at this rate, when she has her heart full of malice; I don't know but it may make me miscarry. Sir, I say again and again, that she was no better than one of us, and I know it; I have seen it with my eyes, so I have. Wild. Good heav'ns deliver me, I beseech thee! How shall I 'scape? Lure. Will you hear me yet? Dear Sir Harry, do but hear me; I'm longing to speak. Wild. Oh! I have it.-Hush, hush, hush. Lure. Eh! what's the matter? Wild. A mouse! a mouse! a mouse! Lure. Where? where? where? Wild. Your petticoats, your petticoats, Madam. [Lurewell shrieks and runs.] O my head! I was never worsted by a woman before. But I have 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 anoth er.] 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 date the decline of English comedy from the time of Farquhar. 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 fortunes 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 |