This is Cibber’s best play of the sentimental type. Its plot is consistent, has dramatic probability, and is serious enough in interest to have real reason for being. The characters are well conceived and well portrayed. In style, too, Cibber is here at his best and the dialogue approaches the finest of the period. The Haymarket opened the season 1706-7 under Swiney, and in order to encourage the new venture, Lord Halifax headed a subscription for the revival of three plays: Shakspere’s _Julius Caesar_, Beaumont and Fletcher’s _King and No King_, and the comic scenes of Dryden’s _Marriage à la Mode_ and _A Maiden Queen_. The last took the form of an adaptation called _The Comical Lovers_, the adaptation being the work of Cibber. It was acted February 4, 1707, and was published the same year. The alteration was the result of only six days’ labor,[50] and Cibber claims no originality in it. It met with slight success. _The Comical Lovers_ is another such adaptation as _Love Makes a Man_. Cibber has merely taken the two comic threads from their serious settings and interwoven them, first a scene from one and then a scene from the other, with only the changes necessary to join them, and has followed his sources almost word for word. Cibber was not under the necessity of changing verse into prose, as he had done in _Love Makes a Man_, for the comic sections of Dryden are in prose, according to the changed convention of his time; and in the scene between Melantha and her maid, Cibber has not even taken the trouble to alter a single one of the French words, many of which must have acquired a place in the language and been in good use by Cibber’s time. So far as Cibber’s part is concerned, this is the least important of his plays. _The Double Gallant_ was acted at the Haymarket, November 1, 1707, but was apparently not successful at its first performance. _The Biographia Dramatica_[51] says: “In a letter from Booth to A. Hill we learn that the play, at its first appearance was, as he expressed it, hounded in a most outrageous manner. Two years after, it was revived, met with most extravagant success, and has continued a stock play ever since.” Cibber says nothing about any hounding of the play, but ascribes the failure of the piece to the fact that the Haymarket was too big for plays; a fact that he thinks caused the lack of success of other plays as well as his own. In regard to the authorship, Cibber says:[52] “It was made up of what was tolerable, in two, or three others, that had no Success, and were laid aside, as so much Poetical Lumber; but by collecting and adapting the best Parts of them all, into one Play, the _Double Gallant_ has had a Place, every Winter, amongst the Publick Entertainments, these Thirty Years. As I was only the Compiler of this Piece, I did not publish it in my own Name.”