Pope, and a gentler observer, Steele, found Farquhar’s dialogue “low,” and so it must have sounded between the brave surviving extravagances of the Jacobean buskin and the modulated utterances of _Cato_ and _The Revenge_. A practical talent like Farquhar’s was bound to provoke hard little words from the Popes who shrank from his spontaneous style, and the Steeles who could not approve of the gross themes he had inherited. For sheer good-breeding, some scenes in _The Way of the World_ can never be surpassed; they prove that one cannot hold the stage by talk alone. It is fortunate for Farquhar that he could not emulate the exquisitely civilized depravities of Congreve’s urban Muse. But his dialogue is not “low” to modern tastes; it has, in general, a simple, natural zest, infinitely preferable to the Persian apparatus of the early eighteenth century. Even he, however, can rant and deviate into rhetoric, as soon as his lovers drop upon one knee. More plainly in Farquhar’s work than in that of any contemporary, we mark the glamour of the Caroline literature fading, and the breath of life blowing in. An essentially Protestant nationalism began to settle down upon England for good and all with William and Mary, and it brought subtle changes to bear upon the arts, the trades, the sports, and the manners of the people. In Farquhar’s comedies we have the reflex of a dulling and strengthening age; the fantasticalities of the last three reigns are all but gone; the Vandyck dresses gleam and swish no longer. Speech becomes more pert and serviceable, in a vocabulary of lesser range; lives are vulgarizing, that is, humanizing, and getting closer to common unromantic concerns; no such delicately unreal creature as Millamant, all fire and dew and perfumery,—Millamant who could not suffer to have her hair done up in papers written in prose, and who, quite by herself, is a vindication of what Mr. Allibone is pleased to call “Lamb’s sophistical and mischievous essay,”—walks the world of Farquhar. With him, notwithstanding that the sorry business to be despatched is the same old amorous intrigue, come in at once less license, less affectation, less Gallicism. He reports from the beginning what he himself apprehends; his plays are shorthand notes, albeit timid in character, upon the transitional and prosaic time. His company is made up of individuals he had seen in a thousand lights at the Spread Eagle and the Rummer; in the Inner Temple and in St. James’s Park; in barracks domestic and foreign; and in his native place, where adventurers, eloquent in purest Londonderry,[41] stumbled along full of whiskey and ideas. He anticipates certain phases of Private Ortheris’s thorough-going love of London, and figures his exiled Dicky as “just dead of a consumption, till the sweet smoke of Cheapside and the dear perfume of Fleet-ditch” made him a man again. In this laughing affectionate apprehension of the local and the temporal lies Farquhar’s whole strength or weakness.