“Now, gallants, for the author. First, to you Kind city gentlemen o’ th’ middle row; He hopes you nothing to his charge can lay, There’s not a cuckold made in all his play. Nay, you must own, if you believe your eyes, He draws his pen against your enemies: For he declares, today, he merely strives To maul the beaux--because they maul your wives. Nor, sirs, to you whose sole religion’s drinking, Whoring, roaring, without the pain of thinking, He fears he’s made a fault you’ll ne’er forgive, A crime beyond the hopes of a reprieve: An honest rake forego the joys of life, His whores and wine, t’ embrace a dull chaste wife! Such out-of-fashion stuff! but then again, He’s lewd for above four acts, gentlemen. * * * * * Four acts for your coarse palates were design’d, But then the ladies taste is more refin’d, They, for Amanda’s sake, will sure be kind.” The main action, that which deals with the reformation of the wandering husband, seems to be original with Cibber in every respect. It deals with the reformation of a husband who eight or ten years before has deserted his young wife for a dissolute life on the continent, and who returns to England still more degenerate in mind and morals than when he left, and so entirely depleted in purse that he has not money enough to buy a meal or pay for a night’s lodging for himself and his servant. The husband is finally led to return to his wife, whose appearance has so changed that he does not recognize her, by her pretense of being a new mistress. This subterfuge is more or less remotely suggestive of Shakspere’s _All’s Well that Ends Well_ and Shirley’s _Gamester_, both of which have been suggested as its source; but it owes nothing to them in the working out of the situation. The theme is practically that of _The Careless Husband_: the reformation of a husband not entirely spoiled at heart. The moral teaching is that there is the same pleasure in legitimate enjoyment as in the baser and illicit sort. The innovation consists in the very moral ending of the piece, particularly in the definite decision of the hero to reform, a determination which he expresses as follows: “By my example taught, let every man, whose fate has bound him to a marry’d life, beware of letting loose his wild desires: for if experience may be allow’d to judge, I must proclaim the folly of a wandering passion. The greatest happiness we can hope on earth, And sure the nearest to the joys above, Is the chaste rapture of a virtuous love.”