Again, the drama is not a mere copy of nature,-not a fac-simile. It is the free running hand of genius, under the impression of its liveliest wit or most passionate impulses, a thousand times adorning or feeling all as it goes; and you must read it, as the healthy instinct of audiences almost always does if the critics will let them alone, with a grain of allowance, and a tendency to go away with as much of it for use as is necessary, and the rest for the luxury of laughter, pity, or poetical admiration. Farquhar's as well as Congreve's rakes, sometimes talk cruelly; but it is either towards imposture and trickery, or in the mere sting of the gusto of the will. They mean it to the letter as little as anybody; and we have seen that Farquhar himself died of anxiety for his family. There may have been a vanity in it, in his first productions; and very painful and startling it always sounds; but the very love of pleasure, in a heart like his, ended in making him humane, giving him a strong sense of the right of pleasure in others; and it was doubtless out of a sense of the desire and feasibility of this for all the world, and a suspicion of the world's paining itself overmuch and not wisely, that he talked on some subjects as carelessly as he did, and not out of any indifference to the happiness and real virtues of mankind. Read him, and his still freer spoken brethren, in the liberal spirit of that understanding, and you are safe in proportion to the goodness and cheerfulness of your own heart. If you feel neither generous nor blithe in the perusal, neither moved to correct the letter of the worst passages by the spirit of the best, nor to feel that the whole has some healthy end beyond itself, thus mistrusting the final purposes and good-nature of Nature herself, as they operate through the medium of a lively art, you may certainly need restraints which these holiday-going dramatists are as certainly not in a condition to supply. And lucky will you be if you get them in mirth-denouncing quarters, without their depriving you of the charity which such writers do not deny to anybody, and thus subjecting you to those hard and melancholy views of the world itself, which are the worst results of conduct the most vicious. Every book, it is true, even the noblest, is not a child's book, nor a guide to ordinary conduct; but a mind, candidly and healthily trained, may be suffered to grow up in almost any library; and you may put premature fears in it far worse than none. Nature approves of what is gradual, and loves a decent investment; but she is not fond of mutilated editions.

On the other hand, we are not to suppose that such a world as that of the very best of these dramatists is the best sort of world, or the cheerfullest, and the one to be most desired; much less such a suffocating region of fine heartless ladies and gentlemen as that of Congreve, who, in his passion for wit and a plot, thought of nothing but intrigue and lying, and saying two contrary things at once. It wanted all the poetry of the drama of the preceding ages, and had no fixed belief in any of the philosophy of the future; though the good nature of the better part of it was a kind of substitute for both. The best as well as worst of its women, for instance, are only fit to laugh and to perish. Perpetuity disowns them as thorough capable human creatures, such as Desdemona and Imogen,-ready-made for being finally beautiful and moral, under the best conceivable dispensation: and yet the Sylvia and Mrs. Sullen of Farquhar have links with even women like these, by the force of their sympathy with whatsoever is kind and just; and Wycherley's Fidelia is an imitation of them. But who that is anything but half a man, ignorant of what such whole books as Shakspeare's can make him, would think of taking to his heart the flimsy creatures, made of ribands and tittle-tattle, out of the rest of the volume before us? or the hoydens, that come driving out of the pantry, and running down the butler? Wycherley was obliged to go to the former times for his new edition of Viola; and so was Farquhar for his Oriana. And it is not a little curious to see, up to the days of sentimental comedy, what an uncouth tendency there was, whenever a little romance and good faith was to be introduced, to stilt up the dialogue into verse or measured prose; as though the moment the writers came to anything serious, their own style was felt to be nought, and that of their predecessors the only worthy language of truth and beauty. Vanbrugh himself begins in verse: but is soon obliged to give it up. In fact, English comedy, as it is emphatically understood to be such in these prose dramatists, is the poorer half of the comedy of the preceding age; or the levity and satire of it, deprived of its poetry. Farquhar's "Inconstant," inasmuch as it is a de-poetization of Fletcher's "Wild-goose Chace," is a type of the whole series. It is a mistake however to suppose

that its licence began with the prose-writers. Licence in abundance, far theirs, was in the prosaical part of the spirit of the poets of the time of J one of the most licentious of prosers; it was already pulling down their g believing heights of Shakspeare; and worthy of reflection is another fact, t excess of the Puritans in denying to whatsoever they thought wrong the 1 virtue, and the least right of gladness of heart, that helped to undo ever identity of the terms, and when reaction came, render it thoroughly diss Puritanism, the best part of which did as much and as lasting good as the evil, was preceded (be it observed), as well as followed, by debauchery. James the First and Charles the Second. The good part of Puritanism re but the bad part reproduced it; and if Etherege and Wycherley, by dint of heartedness that made them comic writers, had not been better men tha revilers, a truly infernal business they would have made of the new reaction,satire, and a denial of those rights of mirth and laughter, which God has cre This was the mistake of Collier, the non-juring clergyman who came f "wickedness" of the drama. We mean, he assumed that the writers we fiends, who had positively malignant intentions; and in so doing, he was no a vice in his own spirit, which if they had thought as ill of it as he did of t warranted them in denouncing him as the far greater devil of the two. unmitigated wickedness at all, is itself the worst part of the result of vice; nam and an attribution to the Creator of having made what he never did. It is n of day to enter into the details of this once famous controversy. Collier w vehement but half-witted man, who did good to the stage, inasmuch as he for of decorum; but he quite overdid his charges on the score both of intentio he would have fallen flat in his own fury, if the very weapons of his oppor him. Farquhar saw this in his youth, and noticed it in his first publication Covent Garden;"-unless, indeed, his remarks are a report of what was actu speaks of.

"Peregrine" (that is himself, whom he elsewhere designates a "strange to the play; where meeting some of his ingenious acquaintance, viz., Mr. W with others of that club, (perhaps Wycherley, Hopkins, and Moyle,) t concerning the battle between the church and the stage, with relation maintained the parties. The result upon the matter was this, that Mr. C malice and rancour for a churchman, and his adversaries too little wit for th that their faults transversed would show much better, dulness being Mr. Collier's functions, as malice and ill-nature is more adapted to the profo best way of answering Mr. Collier, was not to have replied at all; for there book, had not his adversaries thrown in fuel, it would have fed upon itself blaze. As to his respondents, that Captain Va- (Vanbrugh) wrote too esteemed a good casuist; that Mr. C- -'s (Congreve's) passion in the bu reason, which had shone so fair in his other writings; (and) that Mr. Se Captain Vaas much as he did Mr. Settle's gravity."-P. 29.

Vanbrugh said well of Collier, that he made "debauches in his piety, as drink." On the other hand, conceive the horror of Collier at seeing Vanbrug he was really not aware of the indecencies imputed to him, and that he could ve woman laying his plays by the side of her Bible. It is difficult to believe that t of the Captain's impudence in this; and yet Bishop Earle, in some verses on compliments him and Fletcher on their total freedom from indecency "indecency" in those times meant nothing but the plainest kind of speech; a habit of it, from the sovereign downwards, that it is one of the proofs of t poetry on the minds of Beaumont and Fletcher, that they abstained from la

intensity upon the public. Collier did not suspect that one profession might have its privileged "indecencies" as well as another, and that a clergyman of those times might be solemnly and furiously vicious, indecent for want of the decorums of charity, and "wicked" for want of charity itself. Yet we have now lived to see, that if the stage at that time was one half licentious, in the other half it was not only innocent of all evil intention, but had a sort of piety in the very gaiety of its trust in nature; while Jeremy Collier, if he was one half of him pious and well-intentioned, was in the other half little better than a violent fool.

And the case will be similar in future times with regard to the present. They will think us perhaps more honest in some things than we suppose we are; but most certainly they will attribute vices, or at least barbarous follies, to us in others, of which we have no conception. There is an instinct in all ages, very natural and pardonable, of thinking the best of existing manners; a con. sciousness that times and circumstances and the natural progress of events have to do with them, quite as much as ourselves; and that it is not the most pragmatical denouncers, but the most charitable philosophers, that are likeliest to be in the right as to the best way of improving them. A whole age has, at least, as much right to think good-naturedly of itself as a single bigot. It is a phase and variety of social nature; and to think the worst of it, even on that score, is not paying the greatest possible compliment to the Providence whose cause the bigot impudently takes upon him to advocate with fire and fury, out of the abundance of his bile and vanity. Future ages will be astonished at the "profligacy" of some of our customs, which a theatrical audience not only tolerates, but respects. Yes; and by the same token, many things are done this moment, and thought very little of-nay, reckoned creditable to the wit, and knowledge, and conventional respectability of the doers,which two hundred years hence will be thought as immoral and ridiculous as we now think the immoralities and absurdities of the days of Charles the Second. And if these or some of them do not immediately present themselves to every intelligent reader's mind, it only shows how far we are gone in them, and how we are blinded in their gulf;-fortunate still if we do but know this, that times will improve after us, as well as those that have gone before us; and that those will see their own way through error best and cheerfullest, who think the best and kindest of whatsoever nature has done. The two best sermons we ever heard (and no disparagement either to many a good one from the pulpit), were a sentence of Dr. Whichcote's against the multiplication of things forbidden, and the honest, heart-and-soul laugh of Dorothy Jordan.

Upon the spirit in which these dramatists ought to be read, Mr. Lamb has written an essay, exquisite, like all his essays, for the abundance of the thoughts, the unsuperfluousness of the words, and the subtlety of their expression. We venture to differ with one or two points, and shall state why; but it is all so much to the purpose of the present volume, as well as so beautiful in itself, that we shall first transfer the whole of it to our pages, at the expense of their less relishing contents.

ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY.

The artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage. Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years only, to be exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear them. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occasional licence of dialogue? I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to the point of strict morality), and take it all for truth. We substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. We try him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis persona, his peers. We have been spoiled with-not sentimental comedy -but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all-devouring drama of common life; where the moral point is everything; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed

a moment.

personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy), we recognise ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies, the same as in life,—with an interest in what is going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for What is there transacting, by no modification is made to affect us in any other manner than the same events or characters would do in our relationships of life. We carry our fire-side concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go thither, like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that neutral ground of character, which stood between vice and virtue; or which in fact was indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in question; that happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry-is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder, and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket surtout of precaution against the breeze and sunshine.

I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience,-not to live always in the precincts of the law-courts,—but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions-to get into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me

Secret shades

Of woody Ida's inmost grove,

While yet there was no fear of Jove.

I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve's-nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's -comedies. I am the gayer at least for it; and I could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairy-land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it, it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong; as dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, or Angels. But in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad?-The Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense; in fact they do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws, or conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land of— what shall I call it ?—of cuckoldry-the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is. No good person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these plays-the few exceptions only are mistakes-is alike essentially vain and worthless. The great art of Congreve is especially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his scenes, some little generosities in the part of Angelica perhaps excepted,- -not only anything like a faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy, as the design (if design) was bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which his "Way of the World" in particular possesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing-for you neither hate nor love his personages-and I think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his creations; and his shadows flit before you without distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of deformities, which now are none, because we think them none.

Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets,--the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring

of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognised; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced in their world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings-for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated-for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage-bed is stainedfor none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted, no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder-for affection's depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong,-gratitude or its opposite,-claim or duty,-paternity or sonship. Of what consequence is it to Virtue, or how is she at all concerned about it, whether Sir Simon, or Dapperwit, steal away Miss Martha; or who is the father of Lord Froth's or Sir Paul Pliant's children?

The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at the issues, for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs and mice. But, like Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our coxcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our very dreams.

Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen the "School for Scandal" in its glory. This comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley, but gathered some allays of the sentimental comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that it should be now acted, though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice -to express it in a word—the downright acted villany of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness, the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy, which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother; that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are passages,-like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a poor relation,-incongruities which Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy the other-but over these obstructions Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any pleasure; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incongruous; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities: the gaiety upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of Palmer to reconcile the discordant elements.

A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid everything which might tend to unrealise, and so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the death-beds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say have disappeared from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul's Church-yard memory—(an exhibition as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former,-and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting-fork is not to be despised, so finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of the rod,--taking it in like honey and butter, with which the latter submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet with the apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies' surgeon. What flesh, like loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate mower?-John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. You had the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips. His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it. What was it to you if that half reality, the husband, was overreached by the puppetry-or the thin thing (Lady Teazle's reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a plethory? The fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has passed from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness. The pleasant old Teazle, King, too, is gone in good time. His manner woui scarce have