"_Fashion_, a Comedy! I'll go--but stay-- Now I read farther, 'tis a _native_ play! Bah! home-made calicoes are well enough, But home-made dramas _must_ be stupid stuff. Had it the _London_ stamp 'twould do; but then For plays we lack the manners and the men! Thus speaks _one_ critic--hear _another's_ creed: _Fashion!_ What's here? [_Reads._] It never can succeed! What! from a _woman's_ pen? It takes a _man_ To write a comedy--no woman can! * * * * * But, sir--but, gentlemen--you, sir, who think No comedy can flow from _native_ ink-- Are we such _perfect_ monsters, or such _dull_, That wit no traits for ridicule can cull? Have we no follies here to be redressed? No vices gibbeted? No crimes confessed? * * * * * Friends, from these scoffers we appeal to you! Condemn the _false_, but, oh, applaud the _true_! Grant that _some_ wit may grow on native soil, And Art's fair fabric rise from _woman's_ toil! While we exhibit but to _reprehend_ The social vices, 'tis for _you_ to mend!" The audience was long and loud in its applause of the prologue, but the play was so well written, so well represented, and so deserving of success that Mrs. Mowatt and Mr. Sargent might have spared themselves their appeal to the sympathy of the general public. The critics, as a rule, were well disposed, although Edgar Allan Poe, one of the sternest of them, said that _Fashion_ resembled _The School for Scandal_, to which some of its admirers had likened it, as the shell resembles the living locust; a stricture which was hardly just. _Fashion_ created an excitement in the theatrical world that had not been known for years before, and has hardly been equalled since. It was said, and with some truth, to have revived the drama in this country, and to have reawakened a declining taste for dramatic representations of the higher and purer kind. It was almost the first attempt made to exhibit on our stage a correct picture of American society and manners, and although it was a satire on a certain _parvenu_ class, conspicuous then as now in the metropolis, and always likely to exist here, it was a kindly, good-natured satire that did not intend to wound even when it was most pointed. Several familiar New York types were faithfully and cleverly represented: the millionaire merchant, vulgar, self-made, proud of his maker; and his wife, uneducated, pretentious, devoted to dress and display, seeking to marry her daughter to the adventurous foreigner who is not yet obsolete in the "upper circles" of metropolitan society. There were besides these, in the underplot, a rich old Cattaraugus farmer, his granddaughter (a dependant in the merchant's family), a prying old maid, a black servant, a poet, and a fashionable selfish man of the world. All of these were well drawn and natural. The