Many of the dramatists of the Restoration were men of good and aristocratic families, witty and profligate cavaliers, who had returned from exile with their king. The family of the earl of Berkshire produced no less than four writers of comedy, all brothers, Edward Howard, colonel Henry Howard, sir Robert Howard, and James Howard, while their sister, the lady Elizabeth Howard, was married to the poet Dryden. Edward Howard's first dramatic piece was a tragi-comedy entitled "The Usurper," which came out in 1668, and was intended as a satire upon Cromwell. His best known comedies were "The Man of Newmarket," and "Woman's Conquest." Colonel Henry Howard composed a comedy entitled "United Kingdoms," which appears not to have been printed. To James Howard, the youngest of the brothers, the play-going public, even then rather a large one, owed "The English Mounsieur," and "All Mistaken, or the Mad Couple." Sir Robert Howard was the best writer of the four, and wrote both tragedies and comedies, which were afterwards published collectively. The best of his comedies is "The Committee," which was first brought on the stage in 1665, and through some chance, certainly not by its merit, continued to be an acting play during the whole of the last century. "The Committee" is by far the best of the dramatic writings of the Howards. Its design was to turn to ridicule the Commonwealth men and the Puritans. Colonel Blunt and colonel Careless are two royalists, whose estates are in the hands of the committee of sequestrations, and who repair to London for the purpose of compounding for them. The chairman of the committee is a Mr. Day, a worldly-minded and sufficiently selfish Puritan, but who is ruled by his more crafty and still less scrupulous wife, a designing and very talkative woman. Both are of low origin, for Mrs. Day had been a kitchen-woman, and both are very proud and very tyrannical. Among the other principal characters are Abel Day, their son, Obadiah, the clerk to the committee, a man in the interest of the Days, and an Irish servant named Teague, who had been the servant of Careless's dear friend, a royalist officer killed in battle, and whom the colonel finds in great distress, and takes into his own service out of charity. The character of Teague is a very poor caricature upon an Irishman, and his blunders and bulls are of a very spiritless description. Here is an example. Teague has overheard the two colonels state that they should be obliged to take the Covenant, and express their reluctance to do it, and in his inconsiderate zeal, he hurries away to try if he cannot take the covenant for them, and thus save them a disagreeable operation. In the street he meets a wandering bookseller--a class of pedlars who were then common--and a scene takes place which is best given in the words of the original:--