ful piece, the 'Conscious Lovers,' is by common consent of modern critics an insufferably dull comedy.

If comedy could not be revived by the more or less favourable literary conditions of our Augustan age of literature, it was not to be expected that it should flourish when both social life and literature had somewhat degenerated in the reigns of the first Hanoverian sovereigns, and court influence on manners and on the worlds of society and of letters was at its very lowest. The form that comedy took at this stage of its career was after a bad fashion that came from France; and of the so-called Comédie Larmoyante represented with us by Whitehead's 'School for Lovers' and Kelly's 'False Delicacy', one may safely say that the low-water mark of comedy-writing in England was reached. A reaction to a better style began with Garrick himself. By him, and under his auspices as manager of Drury Lane, some of the good Restoration comedies were re-cast and adapted to suit the taste and morals of a politer and more decent age. His and the elder Colman's joint work, The Clandestine Marriage,' and Colman's 'Jealous Wife,' are good acting plays which long held the stage. They are, however, hardly more than rifacimentos of the Restoration comedies, but they lack the old wit and

they lack the old brilliancy of style. I have not found a quotable scene from either. Cumberland was a more original, if a tamer and a more sententious writer. From his West Indian' a characteristic scene will be found in the following pages.

The works of these dramatists and of such lesser lights as E. Moore and Murphy were wholly eclipsed by the brilliant dramatic genius of Sheridan, and by the delightful humour of Goldsmith-dramatists wholly dissimilar in manner and in treatment, but both alike in this, that they mainly worked on the lines of Congreve and Farquhar. These two writers are the last of the comedy authors I have quoted from. After their time came a change over English manners. A republican plainness of address, caught from across the Channel, soon to degenerate into awkwardness, not to say sheepishness, banished the old courtly carriage and demeanour from England. Wigs and gold-laced coats, canes and swords, went with our good manners. Every one wore the same coat and affected the same address. In good comedy, gradation and contrasted apposition of manner and of outward bearing and appearance are as much a necessity as in a good picture gradation and apposition of light and shade; but now there was a

1

dull uniformity in life, and nothing left for comedy to make play with. Though there came a reaction presently afterwards, and though some sort of an extravagance in costume and some sort of an extravagant attempt at exclusive manner and address prevailed under the Regency, it was too dull and coarse and gross, too wanting in light and shade and in refinement, to be reproducible in good comedy. It was a society which for stage purposes could only be exaggerated into broad farce; consequently, this was the age of Farce. Comedy was dead.

In making the selections from the Comic Dramatists which are to follow, it has been my endeavour not merely to put together at haphazard a number of comedy scenes that shall amuse and entertain the reader of them, but to give him in a succinct form something which shall thoroughly represent our English comedy literature.

So far as the flavour of a play can be discerned in an extract from it, it is clear that the extract must be one where point and brilliancy of dialogue are preeminent so far the reader will be fortunate, but he must not go away with the notion that point and brilliancy are all he is to look for in these extracts: there is a good deal more, and that he may appreciate the

full difficulty of the selector's task, and not bear too heavily upon his shortcomings, it is well to consider what it is that essentially goes to the making of a good comedy, and how far its essence can be set forth in an extract.

Though I have tried to show what conditions of cultivation, taste, and manners make comedy a possibility, human nature is after all not so compliant as always to supply the comedy-writer, even when everything is quite ready for him; nor is this at all surprising if we consider how much and what difficult work he must include within the narrow limits of a comedy. For, first, he must possess one of the rarest of human faculties, that of moving intelligent laughtera faculty which some of our most famous playwrights, in past times, have signally lacked, though they have written so-called comedies.

A wit in social life is admittedly a rarity,—a man, that is, who can keep a company in a roar under the immediate stimulus of present social sympathy and immediate social triumph; but the comedy-writer must do as much as this quietly and sadly at his desk with no stimulus at all, and he must do much more, for while he plays the wit's part at one moment, in the next he must play the dullard's and the butt's who

is to suffer defeat at his own hands, or, harder still, he must double his own part and be the speaker whose greater wit caps his own first effort; and when all is done that wit and epigram can do, no way at all hardly is made with the comedy unless all these intellectual fireworks are homogeneous to the play, promote its plot, or set forth its purpose. Yet in this first essential of natural, telling, pungent dialogue, how seldom is the mark hit even by our better stage authors! However, it will be apparent to the reader who has agreed with me so far, that wit alone, the mere passing scintillations of pointed shrewdness, mere 'intellectual gladiatorship,' delightful quality as it is, is not, dramatically speaking, the form of wit which is serviceable on the stage, nor is it that alone which shall be found in the following illustrations of our English Comic Drama. What actors want, and audiences too, if they but knew their own minds, is a wit that helps the play on, that releases the springs of the plot, or that reveals a character as in a flash of light; a wit that serves the true purposes of comedy by mocking and marking the odd humours of the characters of the play, a wit shrewd and biting like Benedick's or Falstaff's, broad as humanity itself, and always bearing on the movement of the piece-or an