Stratagem_ discloses sly old Boniface and the ingenious Cherry calling and running, running and calling, in a fluster pregnant of farce and revel. Farquhar’s pages are not for the closet; they have little passive charm; to quote from them, full as they are of familiar saws almost all his own, is hardly fair. His mother-wit arises from the ludicrous and unforeseen predicament, not from vanity and conscious power; it is integral, not mere repartee; and it never calls a halt to the action. As was well said by Charles Cowden Clarke, “there are no traps for jests” in Farquhar; “no trains laid to fire _équivoque_.” The clear fun, spurting unannounced in dialogue after dialogue, in incident after incident; the incessant Molière-like masquerades; the thousand little issues depending upon by-play and transient inspiration; the narrowing scope and deepening sentiment of the plot, like a secret given to the players, to be told fully only to the audience most in touch with them—these commend Farquhar’s vivacious rôles to actors, and make them both difficult and desirable. With what unction, from an actor’s lips, falls his manifold and glowing praise of theatres! What a pretty picture, a broad wash of rose-purple and white, he can make of the interior seen from the wings! “There’s such a hurry of pleasure to transport us; the bustle, noise, gallantry, equipage, garters, feathers, wigs, bows, smiles, ogles, love, music, and applause!” And again, in another mood: “The playhouse is the element of poetry, because the region of beauty; the ladies, methinks, have a more inspiring, triumphant air in the boxes than anywhere else. They sit commanding on their thrones, with all their subject slaves about them; their best clothes, best looks; shining jewels, sparkling eyes; the treasures of the world in a ring.” And Mirabel, who is speaking, ends with an ecstatic sigh: “I could wish that my whole life long were the first night of a new play!” This is a drop, or a rise, from Congreve and his aristocratic abstractions. Farquhar, in his youth, had modelled himself chiefly upon the comedy of Congreve, and may be said to have perfected the mechanism which the genius of Congreve had brought into vogue. He never attained, nor could attain, Congreve’s scholarly elegance of proportion and his consummate diction. But he had the happiness of being no purely literary dramatist; he had technical knowledge and skill. He brought the existing heroes with their conniving valets, the buxom equivocal maids, the laughing, masking, conscienceless fine ladies, out of their disreputable moonlight into healthful comic air; and added to them, in the transfer, a leaven of homely lovableness which will forever keep his masterpieces upon the stage.