them, and to borrow their husbands' money. For the first and last time, perhaps, in the history of the English drama, the sympathy of the audience was deliberately sought for the seducer and the rogue, and the laugh turned against the dishonored husband and the honest man. (Contrast this with Shakspere's _Merry Wives of Windsor_.) The women were represented as worse than the men--scheming, ignorant, and corrupt. The dialogue in the best of these plays was easy, lively, and witty the situations in some of them audacious almost beyond belief. Under a thin varnish of good breeding, the sentiments and manners were really brutal. The loosest gallants of Beaumont and Fletcher's theater retain a fineness of feeling and that _politesse de caeur_ which marks the gentleman. They are poetic creatures, and own a capacity for romantic passion. But the Manlys and Horners of the Restoration comedy have a prosaic, cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts. Charles Lamb, in his ingenious essay on "The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century," apologized for the Restoration stage, on the ground that it represented a world of whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws of morality had no application. But Macaulay answered truly, that at no time has the stage been closer in its imitation of real life. The theater of Wycherley and Etherege was but the counterpart of that social condition which we read of in Pepys's _Diary_, and in the _Memoirs_ of the Chevalier de Grammont. This prose comedy of manners was not, indeed, "artificial" at all, in the sense in which the contemporary tragedy--the "heroic play"--was artificial. It was, on the contrary, far more natural, and, intellectually, of much higher value. In 1698 Jeremy Collier, a non-juring Jacobite clergyman, published his _Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage_, which did much toward reforming the practice of the dramatists. The formal characteristics, without the immorality, of the Restoration comedy re-appeared briefly in Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, 1772, and Sheridan's _Rivals_, _School for Scandal_, and _Critic_, 1775-9; our last strictly "classical" comedies. None of this school of English comedians approached their model, Moliere. He excelled his imitators not only in his French urbanity--the polished wit and delicate grace of his style--but in the dexterous unfolding of his plot, and in the wisdom and truth of his criticism of life, and his insight into character. It is a symptom of the false taste of the age that Shakspere's plays were rewritten for the Restoration stage. Davenant made new versions of _Macbeth_ and _Julius Caesar_, substituting rime for blank verse. In conjunction with Dryden, he altered the _Tempest_, complicating the intrigue by the introduction of a male counterpart to Miranda--a youth who had never seen a woman. Shadwell "improved" _Timon of Athens_, and Nahum Tate furnished a new fifth act to _King Lear_, which turned the