buffoon. Intrigue in real life is foreign to the Northern nations both from their virtues and their defects: they have too much openness of character, and too little acuteness and nicety of understanding. It is remarkable that the Southern nations, with greater violence of passion, possess, however, the talent of dissembling in a much higher degree. In the North, life is wholly founded on mutual confidence. Hence, in the drama, the spectators, from being less practised in intrigue, are less inclined to be delighted with concealment of views and their success by bold artifice, and with the presence of mind which extricates from embarrassment in unexpected events of an untoward nature. However, there may be an intrigue in comedy, in the dramatic sense, though none of the persons carry on what is properly called intrigue. In entangling and disentangling their plots, however, the English comic writers are least deserving of praise. Their plans are defective in unity. I conceive that I have sufficiently exculpated Shakspeare from this reproach, which is rather merited by many of the pieces of Fletcher. If, however, the imagination has any share in a composition, it is far from being so necessary that all should be accurately connected together by cause and effect, as when the whole is merely held together by the understanding. The double or treble intrigue in modern English comedies has been even acknowledged by English critics themselves.* The in

* Among others, the anonymous author of an ingenious letter to Garrick, prefixed to Coxeter's edition of Massinger's Works,

ventions to which they have had recourse are often every thing but probable, without charming us by their happy novelty; they are chiefly deficient, however, in perspicuity and easy developement. The most of the English comedies are much too long. The authors overload their composition with characters; and we can see no reason why they have not divided them into several pieces. It is as if we were to compel to travel in the same stage coach a greater number of persons, all strangers to each other, than there is properly room for the journey becomes more inconvenient, and the entertainment not a whit more lively.

The greatest merit of the English comic poets of this period consists in the drawing of character; yet, though many of them have certainly shown much talent in this respect, I cannot ascribe to any of them a peculiar genius for character. Even in this department the older poets (not only Shakspeare, for that may easily be supposed, but even Fletcher and Jonson) are superior to them. The moderns seldom possess the faculty of seizing the most hidden and involuntary emotions, and giving a comic expression to them; they generally draw merely the natural or assumed surface of men. The same circumstance which was attended with such a prejudicial effect in France after Molière's time, came also here into play. The comic muse, in

says:"What with their plots, and double plots, and counterplots, and under-plots, the mind is as much perplexed to piece out the story as to put together the disjointed parts of an ancient drama."

stead of becoming familiar with the way of living of the middle and lower ranks, her proper sphere, assumed an air of distinction: she squeezed herself into courts, and endeavoured to snatch a resemblance of the beau monde. It was now no longer an English national, but a London comedy. The whole nearly turns on fashionable love-suits and fashionable raillery; the love affairs are either disgusting or insipid, and the raillery is always puerile and destitute of wit. These comic writers may have accurately hit the tone of their time; in this they did their duty; but they have reared a lamentable memorial of their age. In few periods has taste in the fine arts been at such a low ebb as about the close of the seventeenth and during the first half of the eighteenth century. The political machine kept its course: wars, negociations, and changes of states, give to this age a certain historical splendour; but the comic poets and portrait-painters have revealed to us the secret of its pitifulness; the former in the imitation of the social tone, and the latter in their copies of the dresses. I am convinced that if we could listen to the conversation of the beau monde of that day in the present, it would appear to us as pettily affected and full of tasteless pretension, as the hoops, the towering head-dresses, and high-heeled shoes of the women, and the huge peruques, cravats, wide sleeves and ribbon-knots of the men.*

* When I give out good or bad taste in dress for an infallible Criterion of social cultivation or deformity, this must be limited

The last, and not the least, defect of the English comedies is their offensiveness. I may sum up the whole in one word by saying, that after all we know of the licentiousness of manners under Charles the Second, we are still lost in astonishment at the audacious ribaldry of Wycherley and Congreve.-Decency is not merely violated in the grossest manner in single speeches, and frequently in the whole plot, but in the character of the rake, the fashionable debauchee, a moral scepticism is directly preached up, and marriage is the constant subject of their ridicule. Beaumont and Fletcher portrayed an irregular but vigorous nature: nothing however can be more repulsive than rude depravity coupled with claims to higher refinement. Under Queen Anne manners became again more decorous; and this may easily be traced in the comedies : in the series of English comic poets, Wycherley, Congreve, Farquhar, Vanbrugh, Steele, Cibber, &c., we may

to the age in which a fashion comes up; for it may sometimes be very difficult to overturn a wretched fashion even when a better taste has long prevailed in other things. The dresses of the ancients were more simple, and consequently less subject to change of fashion; and the male dress, in particular, was almost unchangeable. However, even from the dresses alone, as we see them in the remains of antiquity, we may form a pretty accurate judgment of the character of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. In the female portrait-busts of the time of the later Roman Emperors we often find the head-dresses extremely tasteless; nay, even busts with peruques which may be taken off, probably for the purpose of changing them, as the originals themselves did.

perceive something like a gradation from the most unblushing indecency to a tolerable degree of modesty. However, the example of the predecessors has had more than a due influence on the successors. From prescriptive fame pieces keep possession of the stage, such as no man in the present day durst venture to bring out. It is a remarkable phenomenon, the causes of which are deserving of mention, that the English nation in the last half of the eighteenth century passed all at once from the most opposite way of thinking to an almost over-scrupulous strictness of manners in social conversation, in romances and plays, and in the plastic arts.

Some writers have said of Congreve that he had too much wit for a comic poet. These people must have rather a singular conception of wit. The truth is, that Congreve and the other writers above mentioned possess in general much less comic than epigrammatic wit. The latter often degenerates into a laborious straining for wit. Steele's dialogue, for example, puts us too much in mind of the letters in the Spectator. Farquhar's plots seem to me to be of all of them the most ingenious.

The latest period of English comedy begins nearly with Colman. Since that time the morals have been irreproachable, and much has been done in refined and original characterisation; the form, however, has on the whole remained the same, and in that respect, I do not think the English comedies at all models.