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which Johnson (fresh from the congenial task of belabouring Lycidas) describes in an ecstasy of exaggeration as "one of the greatest productions of English poetry." Of his plays the same critic observes: "He seldom pierces the breast, but he always delights the ear and often improves the understanding." Rowe died in December, 1718, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, "over against Chaucer." His best known piece, The Fair Penitent (1718), reads almost like a travesty of a past Elizabethan drama-all is sentimental and turgid. The blank verse, however, is smooth and literary, and the long speeches are generally rounded off with end-stopped couplets.1

1 Select plays of Dryden and Otway may be studied in the Mermaid Library. Of Dryden's poems there are excellent editions; the Globe (ed. Christie) and the Aldine (ed. Hooper). The Satires have also been edited by Prof. Churton Collins; select Poems (Cromwell, Astræ, Annus, Absalom, Religio, Hind and Panther) by Christie and Firth (Clarendon Press); The Hind and the Panther by W. H. Williams, 1900; while of Dryden's prose, the critical Essays* have been finely edited by Prof. Ker (2 vols., 1900). The standard edition since the eighteenth-century work of Malone is that of Sir Walter Scott, as revised by Prof. Saintsbury (author of Dryden in “Men of Letters" and in "Chambers"). The racy Lives of Dryden, Otway, and Rowe should be read in Dr. Birkbeck Hill's edition of Johnson's Lives* (Oxford, 1905). See also Baker's Biographia Dramatica, L. N. Chase's English Heroic Play, 1903, Beljame and Taine (cited in Book IV. Chap. I.), Lowell's essay on Dryden in Among my Books, the Life of Otway in Dict. Nat. Biog., and Dr. Garnett's Age of Dryden.* Matthew Arnold, in his Preface to the Six Chief Lives of Johnson, speaks up well for Dryden as a mighty worker for the age of prose. "Let us always bear in mind that the century so well represented by Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Swift, and of which the literary history is so powerfully written by Johnson in his Lives, is a century of prose a century of which the great work in literature was the formation of English prose. . . . It is the victory of this prose style, 'clear, plain, and short,' over what Burnet calls the old style, long and heavy,' which

is the distinguished achievement, in the history of English letters, of the century following the Restoration. From the first it proceeded rapidly and was never checked, Burnet says of the Chancellor Finch, Earl of Nottingham: 'He was long much admired for his eloquence, but it was laboured and affected, and he saw it much despised before he died.' A like revolution of taste brought about a general condemnation of our old prose style, imperfectly disengaged from the style of poetry. By Johnson's time the new style, the style of prose, was altogether paramount in its own proper domain, and in its pride of victorious strength had invaded also the domain of poetry."

CHAPTER III

THE COMIC DRAMATISTS OF THE RESTORATION

"He wrote only a few plays, but they are excellent in their kind. The laws of the drama are strictly observed in them. They abound in characters, all of which are shadowed with the utmost delicacy, and we don't meet with so much as one low or coarse jest. The language is everywhere that of men of fashion, but their actions are those of knaves, a proof that he was perfectly well acquainted with human nature, and frequented what we call polite society."-VOLTAIRE on Congreve.

"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."-CHARLES LAMB, On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century.

French models-The Restoration stage-Etherege-Wycherley -Sedley-Crowne-Shadwell-Congreve-Farquhar-Vanbrugh-The Collier controversy.

PASSING from the stage of Shakespeare to that of Dryden we appear to have suddenly entered a new world. The representatives of the drama seem instantly transformed by some Circean potion into beings of a lower type. The mere fact that the drama had been proscribed by the Puritans created a furore for plays among the Royalists. No time was lost in dragging old favourites by Jonson and Fletcher out of the seclusion in which they had remained for over twenty years. But these plays were so little adapted to the manners of 1660 that it soon became the fashion to regard them as antediluvian. The two play

houses, which were all that were licenced in the capital upon the Restoration, depended primarily upon the patronage of the court; and Charles II. was neither indisposed nor wholly unfitted to become an arbiter of dramatic excellence. Inaccessible as he was to the deeper human emotions, and without a grain of poetry in his composition, he was nevertheless a man of exceptional wit and with an exquisite taste and polish. It was not likely that Charles would find Shakespeare and the other dramatists before the flood very much to his taste. His capacity for being bored by the favourite dramatist of his martyred father is, there is little doubt, very accurately illustrated in the pages of Woodstock. He and his court had returned from the Continent, where they had become thoroughly imbued with the French taste; and they now looked forward to declamatory tragedy, embodying ideals of supernatural virtue and self-sacrifice, and couched in rhymed couplets approaching as near as possible to the French model. The contemporary taste for extravagant heroic romances such as those of Madame de Scuderi confirmed the capricious taste of a selfish and debauched society for a morbid and impossible virtue. As regards comedy the popular taste took the more simple and intelligible form of a desire for an accurate presentment of contemporary manners, drawing its material from society and not from nature, and consequently depending on wit rather than on humour. The evolution of stage architecture, by means of which plays were now produced no longer upon an exposed stage or platform but rather as a picture in a frame, the introduction of movable scenery, and the substitution of women for boys in female parts 1 which now became common, all this aided by French models, of which

1 Edward Kynaston, who played Evadne in The Maid's Tragedy in 1661, is believed to have been one of the last male actors of women's parts on the English stage. According to

it is true that the English made a very blundering use, led rapidly to a conception of comedy far removed from that of the favourite Fletcher or the still redoubted Ben Jonson. As the taste for spectacle, for music, and for rhyming heroics was inseparable from the new tragedy, so the foppish airs, the filthy language, and the eternal pursuit of women proper to the contemporary gallant, became the regular staple of the Restoration comedy. The scene was invariably laid either in the metropolis or its suburbs.1

Of the first generation of this comedy, apart from Dryden, the most typical representatives are Etherege, Wycherley, Sedley, Crowne, and Shadwell. Sir George Etherege was a man of fashion and a courtier, who had been much in Paris, and was familiar with all the devices of the French stage, and his plays are of historical importance

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Pepys he was both the prettiest woman and the handsomest man on the boards. Another famous actor in feminine rôles was James Nokes, called Nurse Nokes," from his part in Romeo and Juliet. The ladies soon took their revenge by playing men's parts, to the unconcealed joy of Mr. Pepys.

1 Just before the Puritan revolution of the Civil War closed down the theatres, the stage in England seems to have been in a prosperous condition. There were at least five companies playing pretty regularly: the King's Servants at the Globe (Blackfriars in winter); the Queen's Servants at the Cockpit, Drury Lane; the Prince's Servants in Salisbury Court; two inferior companies at the Fortune and the Red Bull. When the Civil War broke out, the actors, as might have been expected, ranged themselves on the side of the King. Many of them went into the royal army: John Lowin, a famous Falstaff, took an inn called the Three Pigeons, at Brentford, and died very old and very poor. Wild Robinson was assassinated by the enthusiast Harrison (vide Woodstock), who shot him through the head, after he had laid down his arms, exclaiming, "Cursed is he that doeth the work of the Lord negligently." In 1647 all public stages were pulled down, and by an Act of February 11th, 1648, all actors convicted of acting were to be