"The passage is horrible bombast," says Scott. Not living in an early heroic age, in which exaggeration is natural and pardonable, but in the age of scepticism and the Royal Society, Dryden exceeded the ancient licence, and, as when a hero takes off his hat to his mother's ghost, mingled modern manners with more than heroic audacities. Criticism should look for beauties, not faults, said Dryden, but the critics could reply that the whole scheme of the heroic drama was faulty. The result is extravagance and rant, indeed rant was then the fault of the actors on the French stage. Molière had to warn his company that a King, conversing with his Minister, "does not necessarily speak like a dæmoniac". Turning to comedy, we find it but little instructed, in refinement, creation of character, and wit, by the example of Molière. Etherege's three plays "Love in a Tub" (1664), "She Would if She Could" (1667), and "The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter" (1676), are the work of a courtier and amateur concerning whose life and death little is known. The merriment of "Love in a Tub" is a picture of contemporary manners; compared with its prose, the rhyming ten-syllabled couplets of the graver and sentimental characters are almost a relief. The author (1635-1691?), in the Prologue, admits that "wit" (dramatic genius in this case), "has now declined"; avers that "the older and graver sort" would decry new plays in the manner of Fletcher and Ben Jonson; and bids the audience "Only think upon the modern way of writing". In an Epilogue to "Sir Fopling Flutter," Dryden characterizes the hero admirably:-- True fops help Nature work, and go to school, To file and finish God Almighty's fool. If these' pieces have wit, they "have not wit enough to keep them sweet". Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692) was made immortal when he became the butt of Dryden's satire. His plays are useful to students of contemporary manners, and he was the Laureate of William and Mary in succession to "Glorious John". Sir Charles Sedley and Mrs. Aphra Behn have left nothing imperishable but a few songs, the swan songs of the dying Muse of lyric. All these playwrights had before their eyes the inimitable and immortal comedies with which Molière was endowing the literature of France. But, even when they tried to follow this model, their imitations were barbarous: for compared with the literary taste and manners of the Court of Louis XIV, those of the reign of Charles II were brutal.