that which contemporary comedy usually chose to illustrate, two of his plays deserve to be noticed, in which we already seem to be entering the atmosphere of the 18th-century novel.[230] His influence upon Lessing is a remarkable fact in the international history of dramatic literature. Sentimental comedy. The improvement which now begins to manifest itself in the moral tone and spirit of English comedy is partly due to the reaction against the reaction of the Restoration, partly to the punishment which the excesses of the comic stage had brought upon it in the invective of Jeremy Collier[231] (1698), of all the assaults the theatre in England has had to undergo the best-founded, and that which produced the most perceptible results. The comic poets, who had always been more or less conscious of their sins, and had at all events not defended them by the ingenious sophistries which it has pleased later literary criticism to suggest on their behalf, now began with uneasy merriment to allude in their prologues to the reformation which had come over the spirit of the town. Writers like Mrs Centlivre became anxious to reclaim their offenders with much emphasis in the fifth act; and Colley Cibber--whose _Apology for his Life_ furnishes a useful view of this and the subsequent period of the history of the stage, with which he was connected as author, manager and actor (excelling in this capacity as representative of those fools with which he peopled the comic stage)[232]--may be credited with having first deliberately made the pathetic treatment of a moral sentiment the basis of the action of a comic drama. But he cannot be said to have consistently pursued the vein which in his _Careless Husband_ (1704) he had essayed. His _Non-Juror_ is a political adaptation of _Tartuffe_; and his almost equally celebrated _Provoked Husband_ only supplied a happy ending to Vanbrugh's unfinished play. Sir R. Steele, in accordance with his general tendencies as a writer, pursued a still more definite moral purpose in his comedies; but his genius perhaps lacked the sustained vigour necessary for a dramatist, and his humour naturally sought the aid of pathos. From partial[233] he passed to more complete[234] experiment; and thus these two writers, who transplanted to the comic stage a tendency towards the treatment of domestic themes noticeable in such writers of Restoration tragedy as Southerne and Rowe, became the founders of _sentimental comedy_, a species which exercised a most depressing influence upon the progress of English drama, and helped to hasten the decline of its comic branch. With _Cato_ English tragedy committed suicide, though its pale ghost survived; with _The Conscious Lovers_ English comedy sank for long into the tearful embraces of artificiality and weakness. The drama and stage in the period before Garrick. Garrick.