[In the essay below, Bell acknowledges Etherege as the inventor of the comedy of manners and favorably surveys his dramatic works.]

It has been said of the comedies of Etherege that they are mere Conversation Pieces, with barely enough of plot in them to thread the scenes together—a capital defect which weakens their whole foundations; and that the characters are shadows speaking a common language, so little marked by individuality that the dialogue might be shuffled like a pack of cards. The stage literature of the Restoration having long ceased to be either read or acted, nobody has thought it worth while to disturb a verdict, in the justice or injustice of which the world takes little interest; and Etherege has accordingly come down to us as a loose, easy dramatist, who was master of a certain airy way of making his characters talk, but who was altogether wanting in the power of putting them into action.

This judgment has been too hastily adopted. Etherege's comedies are essentially comedies of manners. They seize the fleeting colours on the surface of society, and dispose them on the canvas with a corresponding gaiety of tint and lightness of hand. A weightier treatment would be inconsistent with the aims of those brilliant and volatile productions. There is not much bustle in any of them; but there is everywhere a progressive movement which, worked out with quiet skill in its attenuated details, always rises to a climax at the close. Modern audiences, spoiled by coarser excitements for the carte and tierce of wit, would, probably, consider the dialogue tedious and languid; and the disorderly episodes that delighted the Londoners of the seventeenth century, who recognised their fidelity, would now be endured with impatience, if, indeed, they would be endured at all. Compared with the more advanced comedy of later times, which embraces a wider range of life, presented in more active development, the romping, dissipated comedy of Etherege must be admitted to be diffuse and tame. It has no startling effects. There are no violent transitions or unexpected situations. It never deals in sentiment; and wherever a scrap of seriousness crops up it generally looks like a sly touch of burlesque. The plot, slender as it is, sometimes stands still for half a scene together to let the scapegraces have full swing for their wicked pleasantries; and the current foibles and vices are often lashed in a round of repartees to the suspension of an intrigue, for the certain issue of which the audience are quite willing to be kept waiting on such agreeable terms. Now all this prodigality of the animal spirits, this trusting to impulse rather than to rule, and the setting up of headlong enjoyment above the canons of art, which would be fatal to a comedy of our day, if there were nothing more solid to depend upon, are vital elements in a comedy of manners of the age of Charles II. We must test such plays by the contemporary standard; and, tried by that test, Etherege is at the head of his class.

But it is a mistake to suppose that these comedies are deficient in plot. They have as much plot as they want, or as they could bear. They abound in sprightly incidents, are constructed with considerable ingenuity, considering the fragility of their texture, and are remarkable for the unity and compactness of such action as there is. If the scenes do not always advance the story, they never fail to heighten the colouring; and it would not be easy to retrench them without doing injury to the general effect. Nor should it be overlooked that the story is, by intention, of minor importance in these pieces. In that sense at least they fulfil one of the severest conditions of dramatic art by relying upon Expectation, which is the highest source of interest, in preference to Surprise, which is the lowest. Mysteries or sudden turns of fortune never enter into their design. There are no secrets in them to be kept from the audience. Everything that is done is clear, and everything that is coming is the obvious sequel of what has gone before. The audiences, consequently, who witnessed these plays, knowing what was going to happen quite as well as the author, were not impatient about the catastrophe, and, therefore, could afford to listen at ease to the dialogue.

Sir George Etherege wrote three comedies, the first of which, The Comical Revenge; or, Love in a Tub, was produced at the Duke's Theatre, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, in 1664. He was then about twenty-eight years of age, had not long returned from a tour in France, and had just relinquished the study of the law for the more dazzling attractions of fashionable life. The date of the production of The Comical Revenge determines his position as the founder of English comedy. During the four years that had elapsed since the re-opening of the theatres, the plays acted were nearly all revivals; and the few new pieces produced, such as The Adventures of Five Hours, either owed their origin to foreign sources or were composed of mixed and heterogeneous materials. The Comical Revenge was the first prose comedy that embodied living manners, and reflected back from the stage the habits of the people. Shadwell did not produce his first comedy, The Sullen Lovers—a piece adapted to English modes rather than drawn from them—till 1668, after Etherege's second comedy had appeared; nor did Shadwell acquire distinction as a writer of comedies, notwithstanding the success of his début, for three or four years afterwards, when Etherege was at the height of his reputation. Wycherley's first comedy, Love in a Wood, came out in 1672, eight years after The Comical Revenge; Congreve's Old Bachelor in 1693; and Vanbrugh did not appear as a writer for the stage till 1697. These dates are important, as enabling us to trace to its source that form of pure English comedy whose descending stream has been enriched by the contributions of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, and Sheridan. “The dawn,” observes Mr. Hazlitt, speaking of this style of comedy, “was in Etherege, as its latest close was in Sheridan;” and with this passing recognition he dismisses a claim to priority which a little closer examination would have led him to acknowledge with a larger measure of justice.

Etherege's second comedy, She Would if She Could, was produced at the same theatre, and played by the same actors, in 1668. It was not so successful as the first, although it exhibits some structural improvement.

His third comedy, The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter, was brought out at Dorset Gardens in 1676. Wycherley had produced all his comedies, except The Plain Dealer; Sedley had launched his Mulberry Garden; Shadwell had followed up The Sullen Lovers with three pieces, including the Epsom Wells; and this form of drama had by this time become familiar to the public. In the school which Etherege had himself founded, skilful competitors had appeared, and become established favourites; and it is, therefore, the more worthy of note that this, his last production, was not only his best, but, as a picture of existing society, the most perfect comedy of the age. It is in this particular excellence that Etherege is to be distinguished above all other writers who attempted to transfer the living manners to the stage. He is excelled by Wycherley in greater attributes; but he is incontestably superior to him in the closeness and high finish of his contemporary portraiture. In those qualities none of the dramatists of the Restoration will bear comparison with him. Shadwell's comedies are more crowded with local allusions; but they belong to a lower and ruder order of dramatic writing. Remarkable for audacious invention and prodigious variety, they are no less remarkable for want of symmetry and glaring defects of judgment. They served the fugitive purpose, however, for which they were written, and the very disorder that runs through them was probably one of the secrets of their popularity. But they made no permanent impression on the literature of the stage, supplied no models for study or imitation, and are now never read, except when some industrious antiquary consults their pages for the curious light they throw on extinct habits and fashions. Etherege, on the other hand, although he produced only three comedies—about a fifth of the number bequeathed to us by Shadwell—imparted a permanent character to that form of composition, and created materials out of which many subsequent reputations have been built without acknowledgment. Even Farquhar lies under large obligations to Etherege; and the lineage of most of the fine gentlemen of modern comedy may be distinctly traced back to the Man of Mode. Much of the special merit of these pieces, their comparative refinement in an age of grossness, their disciplined taste, and authentic tone of high breeding, may be referred to the fact that Etherege lived in the circles whose modes he described, and was himself one of the most accomplished men of fashion at the Court of Charles II.

Following the order of production, for the sake of showing the course of Etherege's genius, from its first step to its highest point of development, we will begin with the Comical Revenge; or, Love in a Tub. This comedy offers a striking contrast to the other two, in so far as it is addressed to a different phase of society. We have not to deal here merely with fine ladies and gentlemen. The main interest lies in an opposite direction, the intention being to exhibit in a broad light the roarers, scourers, cheats, and gamblers who infested the town, and made the taverns ring day and night with their riots. Mixed up with these rampant scenes is a pure love story, treated more gravely and earnestly than usual. This love story is the weakest part of the comedy. Etherege was out of his element in a true passion, and, as if he were conscious of the defect, he endeavours to make up for the want of real emotion by turgid declamation. There are two sisters, with romantic names to help them through their tender difficulties—Graciana and Aurelia. Colonel Bruce, a gallant cavalier, is in love with Graciana, who has bestowed her affections upon Lord Beaufort, a walking gentleman of the seventeenth century. The rivals fight a duel on the stage, and the Colonel is disarmed. Resolved not to survive the loss of his mistress, he falls on his sword, and is severely wounded. Carried in bleeding to the house of the lady's father, he discovers that Aurelia, who had magnanimously urged his suit with her sister, has all the time secretly loved him; whereupon he displays a nobility of soul worthy of Bayard himself, by at once relieving Graciana from his importunities, and transferring his affections to Aurelia. The passage in which this evolution is performed, affords a fair sample of that spurious coinage which passed current for the true metal with audiences to whom honourable love was little more than a myth.

BRUCE.
Graciana, I have lost my claim to you,
And now my heart's become Aurelia's due;
She all this while within her tender breast,
The flame of love has carefully suppressed,
Courting for me, and striving to destroy
Her own contentment to advance my joy.
AURELIA.
I did no more than honour pressed me to;
I wish I'ad wooed successfully for you.
BRUCE.
You so excel in honour and in love,
You both my shame and admiration move.
Aurelia, here, accept that life from me,
Which heaven so kindly has preserved for thee.(1)

This meretricious glitter, lacquering such remarkably shabby verse, would have been intolerable from sheer dreariness, but for a humorous underplot, crowded with absurdities, to which it acts as a foil. Sir Nicholas Cully, one of Oliver's knights, is the hero of the low comedy life, or more properly, the broad farce, of the play. He is an unmistakable gull, with a sufficient touch of cunning in him to make him a rogue when occasion serves; a genuine sot of the old, absolute stamp—a swilling, vapouring, country fool; the type of a class of sensual, sweltering ninnies, that abounded at the time, and were remorselessly choused and fleeced by town sharpers through their egregious vanity and love of drink. Whenever he appears, this consummate ass throws the stage into an uproar, kicks the drawers before him with monstrous oaths, is perpetually bellowing out for more wine and music, and is altogether so outrageous and contemptible a wittol, that when Sir Frederic Frolic dupes him into a marriage with his cast-off mistress, under pretence that she is his sister, and then, the cheat being disclosed, advises him to take her down into the country, where she will be sure to pass current amongst his neighbours for a very honest, well-bred woman, one cannot help feeling that the wife, with all her drawbacks, has the worst of the bargain.²

The Sullen of Farquhar is a lineal descendant of Sir Nicholas Cully, and closely resembles him—with a difference. Sullen lacks the active principle that makes Cully turbulent and uproarious. His constitution is not so robust. With Sullen all the vigour is soaked away in tobacco and sleep. Cully is a harder drinker, although he, too, sometimes sinks under it, as when he talks of marrying a widow whom, in his cups, he has mistaken for another woman. “Widow, Sir Frederic shall be one of our bride men; I will have none but such mad fellows at our wedding;—but before I marry thee, I will consider upon it,” and then, by way of considering upon it, he sits down and falls asleep. But his faculties, as far as he has any, are wide awake up to the last moment of speech, and he is no sooner roused than he bursts out as tempestuous as ever. He never complains, like Sullen, of headache and nausea. He is superior to such infirmities. He has not stupified himself with ale; and seems to have got something of the ruddy sunshine of the grape into his nature, only rendered a little muddy now and then by the lees. He is more genial than Sullen; is subject to none of his moods of spleen and brutality; and, although his notions about women are barbarous enough, he regards them through a bacchanalian medium which, at least, makes him treat them more hilariously. In nervous energy he is the representative of the great profligates of the time: his frame is capable of sustaining an incessant round of dissipation, and his animal spirits are inexhaustible. However offensive such a portrait would be on the modern stage, we can easily imagine the popularity that attended it two hundred years ago. There was a provocation to enjoyment even in the name of this boisterous fool, which was much the same as if we were now to put a rich country booby into a play, and call him Sir Nicholas Goose.

The brawls of Cully and his companions are set off by the more fashionable licentiousness of Sir Frederic Frolic, the fine gentleman of the piece—an inferior variety of the genus Dorimant, which was to be brought to full perfection in a future comedy. The first scene plunges at once into the town life, introducing the hero with a flourish of preliminaries, which has been imitated with sundry modifications by subsequent dramatists. Sir Frederic is a pattern rake. He passes his days in adventures with ladies, and his nights in the taverns, seldom finding his way home before six or seven o'clock in the morning. The play begins at noon in his lodgings. He had been out as usual, the night before, carousing after the play. From the tavern he had proceeded to knock up a frail acquaintance at the unseasonable hour of two o'clock, and, being denied admittance, he finished his exploits by breaking the windows and fighting the constables. When the scene opens, his French valet comes into the ante-chamber with a plaister on his head, complaining of his master's conduct; when presently Sir Frederic makes his appearance in a morning gown. This is a key to the whole play; ‘and it makes a capital dramatic opening, which has been appropriated in several modern comedies. But the age of window-breaking and constable-beating is at an end; and the pictures of extinct manners we find in this piece, although very curious to the reader, no longer possess any interest for the spectator.

Notwithstanding his “sorrow and repentance” in the first act, Sir Frederic knocks up a respectable widow in the third, with a rout of link-boys and fiddlers; and the widow, who is not disinclined towards him, lets him in rather than alarm the neighbours and bring a scandal on the house. It is a choice of evils, and she risks her honour to save her reputation. But the adventure leads to nothing; for the lady has no sooner got him into the house, and appeased the uproar, than she very coolly dismisses him to the streets again. This oscillation between impetuous pursuit on the one side, and encouraging repulses on the other, keeps up the movement of the play to the end, when it settles down into the usual contract, with stringent stipulations for future good behaviour.

The second title of Love in a Tub is taken from a single scene, of a thoroughly farcical kind, which has so little to do with the plot that it might be advantageously left out. The French valet makes love to a chambermaid, and after drinking himself asleep is put into a tub with a hole in it for his head, and in this helpless condition he ramps about the stage, swearing and sputtering, to the infinite merriment of the Abigails who have put the trick upon him. Devices of this absurd description are common to this whole class of plays, and are generally so preposterous that one wonders how they could have been endured.

Upon the whole, this comedy is not very artistically put together. The scenes are too detached, and do not always help the progress of the action. There are two hostile meetings on the stage—one serious, and the other humorous. In the former, a duel is fought out before the audience, and the vanquished man and his second, after being fairly overcome, attempt to fall upon their swords—rather too grim an effect for comedy; and in the latter, the coward yields to the bully, and grants his conditions rather than engage. But although the scenes are strongly contrasted, the repetition of the same incident, however varied in treatment, is a blemish in art.

Pepys, whose judgment in these matters is not always so critical, had a poor opinion of The Comical Revenge. He describes it as “very merry, but only so in gesture, not wit at all.” At another time, seeing it played at Whitehall by the Duke's people, he speaks of it as “a silly play,” and adds, “the whole thing being done ill, and being ill also, I had no manner of pleasure in it.” As it is one of those plays that materially depend for their effects on the free humours and high spirits of the actors, the flatness of its performance may, possibly, be attributable to the restraint the players felt themselves under in the presence of the Court, for the cast was exactly the same that had unprecedented success at Lincoln's Inn Fields, the comedy having brought no less than £1,000 to the house in the course of a month. The play was, indeed, so great a “hit,” that it raised the popularity of all the actors concerned in it, especially of Nokes, whose Sir Nicholas Cully was considered his masterpiece. All the parts were in skilful hands; Betterton was the Lord Beaufort (a character much beneath his subsequent reputation), Harris Sir Frederic Frolic, Prince the French valet, and Mrs. Betterton and Mrs. Davis were amongst the ladies.

The Comical Revenge was followed four years afterwards by She Would if She Could, which was not successful, although it had the advantage of the same excellent actors. The idea attempted to be developed in this play is indicated clearly enough in the title. The wife of a country knight, who has outlived her attractions, but not her vanity (to express the lady's weakness inoffensively), lays open siege to a young town gallant, who humours her wishes only to disappoint them, while he prosecutes his designs in another quarter. There is more grossness in the language and conduct of this play than in either of Etherege's other comedies; but in invention it is superior to both, The broad humour is contributed by two country knights, who are resolved to make the most of their visit to London, and are detected in their unlawful indulgences by the ladies of their families. The ladies are themselves engaged in similar courses, and, in order to avert exposure, they adroitly turn the tables on the gentlemen. There is an ingenious situation where they all meet at the “Bear” in Drury Lane, which, unknown to each other, they had selected for their rendezvous; and another, where Lady Cockwood, perpetually frustrated in her object by Courtal, writes notes in the names of her young kinswomen to make an appointment in Spring Gardens with Courtal and his friend Freeman, and then surprises them together. Lady Cockwood's character is abominable enough, but it is full of humour. Her method of managing her husband, and persuading him that she is a woman of exemplary virtue and devoted affection, is irresistibly comical. The imbroglio in the last scene, with the two gallants shut up in a closet (a situation often borrowed, and altered to suit circumstances), and the audacity of the explanations by which the honour of the wife is saved, all suspicions cleared up, and everybody enabled to come off handsomely at the conclusion, are happily contrived.

Some of the usual extravagances are interwoven with the plot to amuse the galleries. Of this description is the stratagem resorted to by Lady Cockwood to keep her husband at home, while she goes out to an appointment with Courtal. The trick consists in locking up his clothes, and leaving him only what she calls his “penitential suit,” a ridiculous costume she forces him to wear, by way of punishment for having been drunk the night before, just as a fool's-cap is put upon a naughty boy at school. The husband, however, is persuaded by his friend, the other tipsy knight, to go to a tavern, and his appearance abroad in this ludicrous dress is a source of infinite mirth to the rest of the characters.

Altogether, we have few examples in English comedy of so much clever mechanism wrought out of such slender materials; but unfortunately the play is so saturated with licentiousness as to render all this constructive skill mere waste and abuse. The laxity of public morals is here presented with startling candour. The whole business of the scene is illicit pleasure. There is not a single person concerned, from the young ladies who come up to town with roses in their cheeks, to the experienced rake-hells into whose arms they are ready to throw themselves, that is not engaged in the same pursuit. The ordinary comedy of intrigue has generally some relief; there is none in She Would if She Could. It is intrigue from first to last. Even the young ladies enter into it with avidity, although it must be admitted to their credit that they betray a little fright when they find matters growing serious.

Pepys was present at the first representation of this comedy, and it appears from his account of its reception that the audience, who came in great crowds to see it, went away disappointed both with the play and the actors.³ This was on the 6th February, 1667-8:—

My wife being gone before, I to the Duke of York's playhouse, where a new play of Etherege's, called She Would if She Could; and though I was there by two o'clock, there was one thousand people put back that could not have room in the pit; and I at last, because my wife was there, made shift to get into the 18d. box, and there saw; but, Lord! how full was the house, and how silly the play, there being nothing in the world good in it, and few people pleased in it. The king was there; but I sat mightly behind, and could see but little, and hear not all. The play being done, I into the pit to look for my wife, it being dark and raining, but could not find her, and so staid going between the two doors and through the pit an hour and half, I think, after the play was done; the people staying there till the rain was over, and to talk with one another. And, among the rest, the Duke of Buckingham to-day openly sat in the pit; and there I found him with my Lord Buckhurst, and Sedley, and Etherege, the poet; the last of whom I did hear mightily find fault with the actors, that they were out of humour, and had not their parts perfect, and that Harris did do nothing, nor could so much as sing a ketch in it;⁴ and so was mightily concerned; while all the rest did, through the whole pit, blame the play as a silly, dull thing, though there was something very roguish and witty; but the design of the play, and end, mightily insipid.⁵

This passage is interesting in two or three points of view. It lets us into the interior of the playhouse, and enables us to see what sort of place it was, with all the celebrities “assisting” at the inauguration of the new piece, and the fine company flocking down from the boxes into the pit when the play was over, weather-bound and waiting for their “Flemish barbs,” and glad of an excuse for a lounge amongst the wits, to pick up stray crumbs of scandal, and a little criticism. It shows us also something of the life of the stage; the imperfect study and ill-humours of the actors—Harris especially, who had a leading part, one of the ramping, uproarious country knights, yet could not sing a catch in it; the excitement of a first representation, drawing so great a concourse to the house that a thousand people were turned away from the doors, and Pepys himself, although he went so early as two o'clock, being obliged to put up with a back seat in the 18d. box, where he could see little and hear nothing; and, still more characteristic of a scene repeated often enough from that time to this, the mortification of the author condemned to see his play spoiled in the acting. And here, too, we have Etherege in his true position amongst the men of taste and fashion, who gave a tone to the literature of the day, and were themselves the principal persons to whom the stage held up its mirror.

The next, and last, is the greatest of Etherege's works. All the characters in The Man of Mode are now the common property, under different modifications, of many plays. But here these stock figures are for the most part new, and contain the germs of suggestions which later writers have expanded and adapted to other circumstances. Dorimant, the universal gallant of the piece, the prince of intriguers, dashing, handsome, irresistibly impudent, and adding to the rest of his fascinations the prestige of a most dangerous reputation, is the progenitor of the Belcours, Doricourts, and a score of brilliant heroes of modern comedy, lacking only those sentimental qualities which were considered necessary some sixty years ago to balance the recklessness of youth, but which would have taken off all its piquancy in the days of the Restoration. Dorimant is not wholly unredeemed, however, by a touch of grace, for after betraying two ladies, he settles down in marriage with a third, the sting of the moral being that the ladies he has undone are reconciled to his desertion by the consideration that he has abandoned them, not for a mistress, but a wife. This desperate refuge of a profligate philosophy lets us a little into the social ethics of the time. When a man married, instead of being shut out from the wild pleasures of the town, he became a sort of licensed libertine, and was more in favour than ever, especially when it was thought desirable, which was seldom the case, to consult appearances. The last woman in the world a mistress would be jealous of was the wife of her lover. It seemed, indeed, to be quite true, as a married roué says in one of these comedies, when he is following up an amour, that “marriage is the least engagement of all, for that only points out where a man cannot love.”⁶

This lax doctrine was carried down traditionally in our popular comedies long after, it is to be hoped, the practice of it had gone into disuse, and was last openly proclaimed under the régime of Garrick, subsequently to which it appears to have given way before a stricter code of domestic morality.

The other characters are a couple of young fellows about town, an old gentleman from the country, and the usual supply of ladies at cross-purposes, and bent upon adventures, with a dash of reserve and prudence thrown in amongst them in the persons of a suspicious mother and, what must have been regarded by most people as an anomalous hybrid, a respectable woman of fashion.

The old gentleman, although he has very little to do, stands out prominently from the rest. We are now so familiar with the portrait of prurient senility on the stage that we must keep in view the chronology of these plays in order to do full justice to the merits of the conception. But with a hundred copies of Old Bellair before us, the rich colouring of the original eclipses them all. Not wanting in sense, he betrays the folly of age only in the dawdling imbecility of a liquorish tooth; and this constitutional weakness is brought into play by his taking a violent fancy to a young girl, and making love to her with an hysterical gusto which has often been imitated, but rarely without degenerating into caricature. His delight is to chirp up to her, and then retreat from her, chuckling and pretending to chide her with a “Go—you're a rogue, you're a rogue;—dod, I can't abide you—I can't abide you!” When he is suddenly called off the scene, he cries out to one of the young sparks who are paying court to her, and laughing in their sleeves at him, “A-dod, what does she say? Hit her a pat for me there!” A vice so ludicrously peccant, and so liable to be overcharged, must have run into mere drivelling grossness in the hands of most of these dramatists—of which we have, indeed, plenty of examples; but it is restrained by Etherege within such careful limits, and regulated with such a judicious regard for the more rational features of the character, as to become a perfectly natural bit of genuine comic humour.

The great part is Sir Fopling Flutter, who gives the title to the play. Upon this elaborate fribbler Etherege has bestowed infinite pains, and the result is the most consummate coxcomb in the repertory of an age when the species were as common as flies in summer. All our stage fops and male coquets trace their lineage to this early exquisite, who overshadows the whole tribe by the costliness of his style and the surpassing self-satisfaction of his bearing. Sir Fopling is a special product of the period; the type of that class of travelled popinjays that brought home to England, in the train of Charles II., the most egregious follies and vanities of France. He has just arrived from Paris, and presents in his person a complete reflection of the extremity of the mode. His costume is a picture of the newest fashions carried to the height of the prevailing extravagance; and its details, which are enumerated with scrupulous minuteness, reveal all the secrets of a fine gentleman's toilet. His periwig is “more exactly curled than a lady's head newly dressed for a ball;” he wears a pair of fringed and perfumed gloves that stretch up to his elbows; every article upon him is of Paris make—the suit by Barroy, the garniture by Le Gras, the shoes by Piccar, the mountainous periwig by Chedreux,⁷ and the gloves by Orangerii, always to be detected by their peculiar odour; knots, tassels, and ribbons stream from every available point of his body; he is literally steeped in scents; he carries his head on one side with the languishing air of a lady lolling in her coach, or angling for admirers from her box at the play; and his mincing conversation, which is the moral counterpart of his dress and action, acquires zest from a pretty lisp which he has studied and practised till it has become indispensable to the expression of his thoughts. Dryden, in his admirable epilogue to the comedy, gives a sketch of Sir Fopling, which, for what it is, is as good as the character itself. He describes him as the representative of the whole race of fops, and as being composed of features selected from a variety of originals.

Yet none Sir Fopling him, or him, can call,
He's knight o' th' shire, and represents ye all.
From each he meets he culls whate'er he can,
Legion's his name, a People in a Man.
His bulky folly gathers as it goes,
And, rolling o'er you, like a snow-ball grows.
His various modes from various fathers follow;
One taught the toss, and one the new French wallow.
His sword-knot this, his cravat this designed,
And this the yard-long snake he twirls behind.
From one the sacred periwig he gained,
Which wind ne'er blew nor touch of hat profaned.
Another's diving bow he did adore,
Which with a shog casts all the hair before;
'Till he with full decorum brings it back,
And rises with a water-spaniel's shake.

This illustrious fop brings before us in colours that will never fade one of those portraits of bygone manners which are entitled to be received as valuable contributions to the gallery of history.

Sir Fopling's share in the action of the comedy is not much. He is merely made use of as a set-off to promote the intrigues of others, he being allowed, all the time, to flatter his vanity with the belief that he is achieving conquests on his own account. It clearly would never have answered the purpose of the dramatist to suffer such a butterfly to carry off the éclat of a successful amour from any of the lusty wooers, who, in their sweeping licentiousness, represented the ascendant spirit of the time. Poor Sir Fopling, therefore, after parading his equipage in the Mall, with a retinue of six footmen and a page, for the purpose of making an impression on a lady who affects to be smitten by him merely to pique the triumphant Dorimant, is unceremoniously dismissed with contempt in the end. But he bears his humiliation like a gentleman, and consoles his wounded pride by resolving henceforth to dedicate himself, not to one woman, but to the whole sex. There is a grandeur in this view of the matter which was, probably, designed to appease the boxes, and reconcile the courtly part of the audience to the discomfiture of a character drawn from living originals in Whitehall.

In this comedy we have an example of that intrigue upon intrigue literally taking place, so to speak, in the open air, and conducted with the most peremptory frankness, which may be accepted as the express image of the scenes that were enacted every day in Spring Gardens, the Mall, the New Exchange, the China-houses, and other favourite places of resort. From the nature of the incidents, the scenes are unavoidably tinged with licentiousness; but they are singularly free from the gratuitous grossness which stained the bulk of the contemporary drama. Etherege threw into his dialogue a tone of society that gave it a certain softening air of refinement. He wrote upon the most dangerous themes like a gentleman.

The following scene will show how complete a master he was of stage art. The situation is constructed with remarkable skill. Old Bellair and Lady Woodvil having determined to force their son and daughter into a marriage, the young people plot together to contrive an escape from it, and have just hit upon the expedient of pretending to be in love with each other for the purpose of deceiving their tormentors and gaining time, when the father and mother make their appearance. The girl, although she professes to be a novice in such matters, falls into the plan with facility, and discovers an aptitude for improvised coquetry which must have been highly piquant in the acting.⁸ The whole scene is played aside.

Y. Bell.
Can you play your part?
HARRIET.
I know not what 'tis to love; but I have made pretty remarks by being now and then where lovers meet. Where did you leave their gravities?
Y. Bell.
In the next room. Your mother was censuring our modern gallant.

ENTER OLD BELLAIR AND LADY WOODVIL.

HAR.
Peace! Here they come. I will lean against this wall, and look bashfully down upon my fan, while you, like an amorous spark, modishly entertain me.
LADY Wood.
Never go about to excuse 'em; come, come, it was not so when I was a young woman.
OLD Bell.
A-dod; they're something disrespectful.
LADY Wood.
Quality was then considered, and not rallied by every fleering fellow.
OLD Bell.
Youth will have its jest, a-dod it will.
LADY Wood.
'Tis good breeding now to be civil to none but players and exchange women; they are treated by 'em as much above their condition, as others are below theirs.
OLD Bell.
Out a-pize on 'em,(9) talk no more, the rogues ha' got an ill habit of preferring beauty, no matter where they find it.
LADY Wood.
See your son and my daughter, they have improved their acquaintance since they were within.
OLD Bell.
A-dod, methinks they have! Let's keep back and observe.
Y. Bell.
Now for a look and gestures that may persuade 'em I am saying all the passionate things imaginable———
HAR.
Your head a little more on one side; ease yourself on your left leg, and play with your right hand.
Y. Bell.
Thus; is it not?
HAR.
Now set your right foot firm on the ground, adjust your belt, then look about you.
Y. Bell.
A little exercising will make me perfect.
HAR.
Smile, and turn to me again very sparkish!
Y. Bell.
Will you take your turn, and be instructed?
HAR.
With all my heart.
Y. Bell.
At one motion play your fan, roll your eyes, and then settle a kind look upon me.
HAR.
So?
Y. Bell.
Now spread your fan, look down upon it, and tell the sticks with a finger.
HAR.
Very modish.
Y. Bell.
Clap your hand up to your bosom, hold down your gown, shrug a little, draw up your breasts, and let 'em fall again gently, with a sigh or two.
HAR.
By the good instructions you give, I suspect you for one of those malicious observers who watch people's eyes, and from innocent looks make scandalous conclusions.
Y. Bell.
I know some, indeed, who out of mere love to mischief are as vigilant as jealousy itself, and will give you an account of every glance that passes at a play, and in the circle.
HAR.
'Twill not be amiss now to seem a little pleasant.
Y. Bell.
Clap your fan then in both your hands; snatch it to your mouth, smile, and with a lively motion fling your body a little forwards. So—now spread it; fall back on the sudden, cover your face with it, and break out into a loud laughter—take up! look grave, and fall a fanning of yourself. Admirably well acted!
HAR.
I think I am pretty apt at these matters.
OLD Bell.
A-dod I like this well.
LADY Wood.
This promises something.(10)

A fuller flavour of the comedy may be obtained from a scene of higher pretensions, in which Dorimant comes out in all the glory of his inconstancy. Wearied of his mistress, Mrs. Loveit, whose violent temper and inconvenient jealousy have worn out his patience, he prevails upon Belinda, her successor in his vagrant affections, to enter into a scheme for getting rid of her. The two ladies are intimate acquaintances, but love cancels all other considerations in the heart of Belinda, who is easily persuaded to accept Dorimant's sacrifice of her friend as a proof of his devotion to herself. It is arranged that Belinda shall pay a visit to Mrs. Loveit, and inflame her jealousy by a story of Dorimant's infidelities with another (who is in reality Belinda herself), and that Dorimant shall break in upon them when the lady is at the height of her fury, and make a pretext of her invectives to discard her on the spot. The conspiracy is sufficiently base; but we must take these people in their own way. We must not look to their conduct for instances of fidelity, nor to their professions for maxims of love. On the other hand, there was no assumption of that “sentimental French plate,” which Joseph Surface substitutes for the “silver ore of pure charity,” and which, he tells us, “makes quite as good a show, and pays no tax.” Everybody knew what they had to trust to in matters of this kind, and took the risk of the issue. Engagements such as that of Dorimant and Mrs. Loveit were regulated by an understood license, which greatly relieves our conscience in contemplating their ruthless violation. The lady could have expected nothing better from a man whose indiscriminate gallantries were so notorious; and, considering the general laxity to which he might have appealed for precedents, it is rather a sign of latent grace in Dorimant, that instead of outraging her pride by open desertion, he pays her the artful compliment of affecting to find in her own actions an excuse for his perfidy. A woman is naturally inclined to extract from such a situation whatever solace it may be made to yield; and the lover who throws upon her the sole responsibility of their separation leaves with her at least the miserable consolation, true or false, that she might have kept him if she had tried.

The scene is sustained with unflagging spirit and energy. The jealous rage of Mrs. Loveit, finding vent in torrents of abuse and despair, and the coolness and gaiety of Dorimant, floating triumphantly above the storm, present a striking opposition of temper, character, and circumstance. But this is merely the dramatic side of the picture. So mean a stratagem, conducted to so successful a close, would utterly revolt our better feelings, were it not that the moral which creeps out at the end, when Belinda expresses her fear that the lover who has acted so cruelly to another may one day act as treacherously to herself, goes some way, if not to redeem a little of the turpitude of the proceeding, at least to deprive it of complete impunity. In a more artificial age, when it would be necessary to propitiate the moral scruples of the audience, Belinda would have been made to exhibit remorse at the barbarous treatment she had brought upon her friend; but there is no affectation in these plays, and the only regret of which she is conscious, and to which she honestly confesses, is purely selfish—a slight, but significant, indication of the predominant sentiment that entered into such incidents in real life.

Etherege's intimate association with the Buckinghams, Dorsets, and Rochesters gives a special value to his comedies. He lived the life he painted, and represented in his own person all the experiences which other dramatists derived at second-hand. His plays have the direct impress of the lax high-breeding of the circles in which he moved. …

Notes

1. Act v., sc. 5.

2. In the last scene we have one of the numerous illustrations to be found in the Restoration comedies, of the indiscriminate mixture of women of character with others of tainted reputation. No less than two of these graceless ladies are brought in married to wind up the play, and join in the general wedding festivities with which it closes, the peculiar antecedents of the brides furnishing a characteristic joke to tag the whole.

3. Dennis says that, although it was esteemed by men of sense for the trueness of some of its characters, and the purity, freeness, and easy grace of its dialogue, yet, on its first appearance, it was barbarously treated by the audience. Shadwell, it will be seen, ascribed its failure to the negligence of the actors, an opinion strongly expressed by Etherege himself.

4. Harris played Sir Joslin Jolly, to whom nearly all the catches or snatches of song were given. Nokes, who had done wonders in Cully, was again fitted with a country knight; but, like most reproductions of a good thing, the second country knight was very inferior to his predecessor. Songs and dances were always introduced into the comedies of this period, and, being highly popular, often retrieved the credit of a new piece. Shadwell attributes the redemption of the Humourists from total condemnation to the success of a favourite figurante, “who, for four days together, beautified it with the most excellent dancings that had ever been seen upon the stage.”

5. Others, it should be noted, held a different opinion. Shadwell, in his preface to the Humourists, threw the whole blame of its ill-success upon the actors. “The imperfect action,” he says, “had like to have destroyed She Would if She Could, which I think (and have the authority of some of the best judges in England for it) is the best comedy that has been written since the restoration of the stage; and eventually, for the imperfect representation of it at first, received such prejudice that, had it not been for the favour of the Court, in all probability it had never got up again; and it suffers for it, in a great measure, to this very day.” Philips, Gildon, and Langbaine also pronounce She Would if She Could one of the best comedies of the age.

6. Shadwell's Epsom Wells.

7. Extravagant periwigs were by no means the exclusive mark of the fribbler and the coxcomb, nor were they even confined to the laity. They were worn by vain clergymen. Pepys was horribly scandalised at seeing the Earl of Carlisle's curate preach in a flowing periwig.

8. The name of the actress who played Harriet, at Dorset Gardens, is omitted from the cast, although the names of all the other performers are given. Jevon played Young Bellair; Betterton was the original Dorimant.

9. Equivalent to “plague on 'em!”

10. Act II., sc. 3.