It is to be noticed that the illicit affair of Sir Novelty Fashion and Mrs. Flareit is made ridiculous and not happy at the end, nor does Sir Novelty acquire a mistress or a wife who has previously been chaste. Likewise there is no husband who is made ridiculous by being cuckolded, and the only amour, if it can be called an amour, that which Amanda’s maid unwillingly has with Snap, is made right the next morning by the marriage of the two. On the other hand, the play, aside from these particulars, exhibits the technique and the material of the typical Restoration comedy. The chief incident deals in most frank style with the sex relations of the hero and heroine, treated essentially in the Restoration way, with the exception that the audience knows they are man and wife while the characters do not. The cellar incident is as frank and gross as anything of the sort in the earlier drama, though in this case the final outcome is a wedding. There is the same succession of lively and disconnected incidents, incidents which would go well on the stage, and which make up five separate threads of story. The substitution of the name of one person for another in the marriage bond is the same sort of thing that occurs over and over again in the earlier comedy.[77] The characters represent the same more or less stiff drawing of conventional figures. Sir Novelty Fashion is of the same family as Sir Fopling Flutter; Lovelace and Young Worthy are the same drunken rakes as those who make the principal characters in the unreformed drama, with the exception that here they are not presented to us as carrying on their amours. Snap is the witty servingman who is invariably paired with the maid of the heroine in Restoration comedy. There is the same presentation of local scenes, particularly that in the park; there is the same coarse speech; and there is the same interruption of the story by raillery. But the play as already suggested is a very distinct step in advance in its treatment of fundamental morality, and marks a conscious beginning of a new mode; not an inconsiderable achievement for the first play of an author twenty-four years old. The two plots of _Woman’s Wit_ (1697) are entirely dissimilar in tone and dramatic handling, and, moreover, have no essential connection with each other. The main plot, which gives the name to the piece, is in the Restoration manner, while the sub-plot, which deals with the Rakishes, is in the mould of the minor late Elizabethans. In its portrayal of manners it belongs to the type represented by the plays of Brome, marked by coarseness rather than finish, and implying about the same standard of morals.