When he wrote _The Rival Fools_ (1709), Cibber seemed, if one may judge from the prologue, to feel that his efforts for reform were not meeting with sufficient response and appreciation, and therefore tells the audience that “All sorts of Men and Manners may From these last Scenes go unreprov’d away. From late Experience taught, we slight th’ old Rule Of Profit with Delight: This Play’s--All Fool.” But though this comedy is not didactic in its purpose, it is morally clean in its action. In _The Non-Juror_ (1717), a play written with an avowedly political purpose, he cannot avoid moralizing and sentimentality, qualities which appear slightly in the story of Charles, and in the relations of Dr. Wolf to Lady Woodvil and Maria. It cannot be claimed that the play has any important bearing on sentimental comedy, however. _The Refusal_ (1721) might be called a purified Restoration comedy, without any positive bearing on the sentimentalizing tendency except that it shows the tendency to make the drama more moral. _The Provoked Husband_ (1728), Cibber’s completion of Vanbrugh’s _A Journey to London_, is typically sentimental in treatment, with the happy ending, the reformation of the vicious, and the true but dull expression of moral sentiments by the serious characters. In it Cibber has departed from Vanbrugh’s original intention by reforming the wife, whom he has preserved as perfectly true to her husband, though unduly given to gambling. In the love affair of Mr. Manly and Lord Townley’s sister we likewise have sentimental treatment, and in the expression of pious thoughts no one could be more prolific than Mr. Manly. In this play Cibber does not strike any note he has not used before; it is merely significant of the permanence of the changed manner of writing in English comedy generally. In the first plot Cibber has somewhat softened the characters of Vanbrugh’s Lord and Lady Loverule in Lord and Lady Townley, giving to the husband a much less dictatorial and more sentimental and uxorious character. Lady Townley, though she does not show any signs of softer qualities, is made to see the error of her course of late hours and gambling, and undergoes a somewhat improbable but characteristic conversion. Cibber tells us[85] that it had been Vanbrugh’s intention to turn the lady out of doors, as would have been natural and logical, giving to the play a serious interest which it lacks under Cibber’s management. The characters are shorn of their rough virility in Cibber’s version. Squire Richard is a sort of rough study of the Tony Lumpkin type,--without his wit, however,--but the credit of the portrayal is due to Vanbrugh rather than to Cibber.