with his reserve, his simple dress, his thin, agreeable voice, his early reputation at college for uncongeniality, acting in every emergency whither we can fairly trace him with deliberate high-mindedness, is far enough from the temper of his restless and jocund creations. He wished to remove the impression that he could have been his own model; for he took pains to inscribe _The Inconstant_ to his classmate, Richard Tighe, and to compliment him upon his kinship with Mirabel, “a gay, splendid, easy, generous, fine young gentleman”; the applauded type, in short, of all that Farquhar’s heroes set out to be. Again, lest he should pass for a realist as rabid as Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who pinioned three hundred and seventy of her acquaintances between the covers of _Clélie_, Farquhar adds this warning to his enthusiastic dedication of _The Recruiting Officer_ “to all friends round the Wrekin”: “Some little turns of humor that I met with almost within the shade of that famous hill gave the rise to this comedy; and people were apprehensive that, by the example of some others, I would make the town merry at the expense of the country gentleman. But they forgot that I was to write a comedy, not a libel.” He disclaims everywhere, with the same playful decisiveness, the interpretations put upon his designs and actions by the world of overgrown infants which he entertained. Endowed with courage and much personal charm, he had small chance of distinguishing himself upon the field, and for the most part shone at a garrison mess; but he had led a not inadventurous life, in which were incidents of the most pronounced melodrama, with a touch of mystery to enhance their value for the curious. Farquhar had travelled, and with an open, not an insular mind; he had, by his own confession, too deep an acquaintance with wine, and with the nightingales of Spring Gardens, outsinging “the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow”; he had been, in short, though with “melancholy as his every-day apparel,” alive and abroad as a private Whig of the Revolution, shy of ladies’ notice till it came, and proud of it ever after. When he printed, in his twenty-first year, _The Adventures of Covent Garden_, he added to it a boy’s bragging motto: _Et quorum pars magna fui_. The inference seems to have clung closer to him than he found comfortable. He complains, not without significance, in his prose essay upon the drama, that the public think any rôle compounded of “practical rake and speculative gentleman is, ten to one, the author’s own character.” With the incident which furnished its thrilling closing scenes to _The Inconstant_, Farquhar had probably no connection; he takes pains to state that the hero of it was the Chevalier de Chastillon, quite as if he feared another confusion of himself, as fearless and quick-witted a man, with the “golden swashbucklers” of his imagination. The rumor which confounded them with him has next to nothing to support it.