Cibber’s comedies, which constitute his best and most important work, may be divided into two general classes: comedies of manners and intrigue, and sentimental comedies. The first class includes two adaptations from Beaumont and Fletcher which are not strictly comedies of manners but are more closely allied to the “comedy of humours,” namely, _Love Makes a Man_ and _The Rival Fools_; one adaptation made out of two plays by Dryden, _The Comical Lovers_; two from Molière, _The Non-Juror_ and _The Refusal_, into both of which he introduced contemporary social and political interest; and three other plays, _Woman’s Wit_, _She Would and She Would Not_, and _The Double Gallant_, the last of which takes its title, if not its plot, from Corneille’s _Le Galant Double_. The sentimental comedies, in which form Cibber was one of the very first to write, are _Love’s Last Shift_, _The Careless Husband_, _The Lady’s Last Stake_, and _The Provoked Husband_, the last being a completion of Vanbrugh’s _Journey to London_. The first class consists almost altogether of adaptations; the second class is essentially original. II CIBBER AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SENTIMENTAL COMEDY 1. CIBBER, NOT STEELE, THE IMPORTANT FIGURE IN ITS EARLY DEVELOPMENT. The fully developed form of sentimental comedy may be said to begin with Steele’s _Conscious Lovers_ (1772) and to end with the attack upon it made by Goldsmith, Foote, and their followers. Goldsmith was “strongly prepossessed in favour of the poets of the last age and strove to imitate them,”[57] and by his reintroduction of humor into comedy he exerted a strong influence toward the downfall of the sentimental type. The end of this vogue is generally well understood, but the beginning of it has not been investigated with the same thoroughness. Steele is generally given the credit of being the innovator who reformed the stage,[58] although Ward and others give some credit to the work of Cibber. The importance of Cibber in the development of this form and in the moral reformation of comedy, the effect of social conditions, and the gradual change from the Restoration type, have not been fully studied. Colley Cibber was the most important writer of comedy in preparing the way for the new form, and practically every element of the later sentimental comedy is found in his work. But Cibber was not a reformer calling on his age to repent; he was rather answering a general demand of his time.