Some uneasiness, some misgiving, are at the bottom of his homely materialism. He thinks it best, on the whole, to forswear the temptation to be sublime, and to keep to his cakes and ale; and for cakes and ale he had an eminent and inborn talent. What was ably said of Hogarth, the great exemplar, will cover all practicians of his school: “He had an intense feeling for and command over the impressions of senses and habit, of character and passion, the serious and the comic; in a word, of nature as it fell in with his own observation, or came into the sphere of his actual experience. But he had little power beyond that sphere, or sympathy for that which existed only in idea. He was ‘conformed to this world, not transformed.’” Or, as Leigh Hunt, in his beautiful memoir, adds, with acuteness, of Farquhar himself: “He could turn what he had experienced in common life to the best account, but he required in all cases the support of ordinary associations, and could not project his spirit beyond them.” In short, Farquhar lacked imagination. He had insight, however, of another order, which is his praise, and which distinguishes him from all his fellows: he had sympathy and charity. The major blot on the literature of the English stage of the period is not its libertinism, but rather its concomitant utter heartlessness. “Arrogance” (so, according to Erasmus, that ascetic scholar Dean Colet used to remind his clergy) “is worse than a hundred concubines.” The slight sporadic touches of tenderness, of pity, of disinterested generosity, to be found by patient search in Congreve, come in boldly with Farquhar, and boldly overrun his prompter’s books. Vanbrugh’s scenes stand on nothing but their biting and extravagant sarcasm. As Congreve’s characters are indiscriminately witty, so Vanbrugh’s are universally and wearisomely cynical, and at the expense of themselves and all society. His women in high life have no individuality; they wear stings of one pattern. The genial conception of the shrewd, material Mrs. Amlet, however, in _The Confederacy_, is worthy of Farquhar, and certainly Congreve himself could not have bettered her in the execution. Etherege’s typical Man of Mode is a tissue of untruth, hardness, and scorn, all in impeccable attire; a most mournful spectacle. Thinking of such dainty monsters, Macaulay let fly his famous invective against their creators: “Foreheads of bronze, hearts like the nether millstone, and tongues set on fire of hell!” George Farquhar may be exempted altogether from this too-deserved compliment. There is honest mirth in his world of fiction, there is dutifulness, there is true love, there are good women; there is genuine friendship between Roebuck and Lovewell, between Trueman and Hermes Wouldbe, between Aimwell and Archer, and between the green Tummas of _The Recruiting Officer_ and his Costar, whom he cannot leave behind. Sylvia, Angelica, Constance, Leanthe, Oriana, Dorinda, free-spoken