survivors but in that hope we were shamefully disappointed; neither these arrears, nor even his legal demands for monies expended on improvements, beneficial to the demesne, and regularly certified by his diocesan, could be recovered by me for my sister's use, till the Lord Primate took the cause in hand, and enforced the sluggish and unwilling satisfaction from the bishop, who succeeded him."

When he had leisure from his grief to resume the operations of his pen, he sat down to the composition of The Choleric Man, and in 1775 it was produced on the stage of Drury-Lane. It was successful, and perhaps deserved to be so; but it is executed with less uniformity of skill than was displayed in his West Indian and Fashionable Lover.

In the character of The Choleric Man, (Nightshade,) he lost the opportunity which he possessed, of exhibiting the passion of anger as a prevailing quality, by making him always in a passion, and too often without sufficient or apparent provocation: he is rather an outrageous bully whom nothing can please, than a man of morbid irritability whom most things can displease. Had he looked abroad upon life, he would have found no such being as his choleric man, for no individual exists in a constant whirlwind of passion: no individual exists, (out of Bedlam at least) who has so far subdued his reason to the exacerbations of

a violent temper, that he raves with fury if he be contradicted, and yet extols his own patience and meekness.

This he would not have found: but he might have found, and too easily, indeed, for the happiness of mankind, men whom long indulgence in their own excesses has so corrupted, that they deform every scheme of social life, into which they are permitted to intrude, with storm and tempest; men who have pampered themselves into habits of such bloated arrogance, that they despise all the blandishments of society, and, like wayward children who annoy one into compliance, they enforce a toleration of their excesses because to contend with their exactions would be to provoke greater evils than are sought to be avoided. Yet even these men have their intervals of calm and quiet: for it commonly happens that their anger is roused by the application of peculiar behaviour, or the discussion of peculiar topics, as it is often found that insanity manifests itself only when a particular idea is forced upon the attention. They are not always angry, like the Choleric Man of Cumberland, but sometimes assume the appearance and have the reality of reason.

To have discriminated this difference would have afforded scope for a fine display of character, by exhibiting the inconsistences into which the same man may be betrayed who is, at one time, the slave of violence, and at another the creature of reason.

From such a character, also, he might have deduced a just moral, by contrasting the virtues of his calm moments with the vices and follies of his enraged ones; and shewing that there is no security in the integrity of a passionate man by making him annul, or destroy, the efficacy of those beneficent actions which he may have performed in the cool moments of deliberate and rational conduct.

This was what the author might have done with such a character, instead of which he has exhibited merely an impetuous ruffian, whose reformation is at last produced by an act of violence committed from such an idle provocation, or rather from no provocation at all, that both the reader and the spectator despise the extravagance of the incident.

The remaining personages of this play may be dismissed without much examination. The two brothers are opposed to each other with such an obvious contrast of sentiments and conduct, that we know the author's intention must have been merely to produce an antithesis of character, if I may be allowed the expression: for, such fraternal contrariety is seldom witnessed in actual life. They seem to have been drawn in imitation of those artificially contrasted characters which are to be found in the plays of our best dramatists, but which always betray a poverty of invention. It is so easy, when one brother is calm and placid, to make the other rough and boisterous, or if one be crafty and insidious to pourtray the other

open, ingenuous, and unsuspecting, that a superior writer might justly despise such an expedient for its facility while it might be worthy of his highest ambition to discriminate them by those delicate and almost evanescent shades of character which gradually blend into each other like the prismatic colours, and yet are distinguished one from the other.

Cumberland, however, thought differently upon this subject, and speaks of the "comic force" with which the contrast between the two brothers is supported, while he seems to applaud the invention that contrived that contrast. But an author has long been reputed the very worst judge of his own works, whence, perhaps, the reason that Cumberland says, of the present play, "that the characters are humorously contrasted, and there is point and spirit in the dialogue;" and that, if ever an editor shall, hereafter, make a collection of his dramas, this "will stand forward as one of the most prominent among them." To this opinion, thus modestly expressed, I must object from a strong conviction, in my own mind, that the dialogue has neither point nor spirit.

Perhaps, what the author has dignified with these appellations, may appear to others dull and vapid; as, for example, when Manlove inquires of his clerk what fee he received with a case from a tailor, who asks how he is to proceed against his wife for adultery: the clerk replies, a light

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guinea," and Manlove answers, "tis more than a light woman deserves"-and adds, in a strain of equal wit and raillery, "give the tailor his guinea again; bid him proceed to his work, and leave a good for nothing wife to go on with hers; and hark'ee Frampton, you seem to want a new coat, suppose you let him take your measure: the fellow, you see, would fain be cutting out work for the lawyers."

I have no doubt that when Cumberland wrote this, he conceived he was producing a witty observation; but I greatly doubt whether any person ever thought so besides himself.

Neither can I much commend the point of the following remark.

"I must believe," says Letitia, "that no man would descend from the character of a gentleman, who was not wanting in the requisites that go to the support of it."

If a man want that which is essential to any thing, he cannot surely be said to possess it: and if he do not possess it, how can he forfeit the possession ?

If it were to such felicities of composition that Cumberland alluded, when he pronounced so favourably of this play, the question is decided: but probably he might mistake a dialogue approaching nearly to licentiousness for point and spirit, in which case I can suppose he had in his mind the scene between Letitia, Mrs. Stapleton, and Jack