Then, the drama of 1773! There was Home’s ‘Alonzo,’ which, said Walpole, ‘seems to be the story of David and Goliath, worse told than it would have been if Sternhold and Hopkins had put it to music!’ But the town really awoke to a new sensation when Goldsmith’s ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ was produced on the stage, beginning a course in which it runs as freshly now as ever. Yet the hyper-fine people of a hundred years ago thought it rather vulgar. This was as absurd as the then existing prejudice in France, that it was vulgar and altogether wrong for a nobleman to write a book, or rather, to publish one! There is nothing more curious than Walpole’s drawing-room criticism of this exquisite and natural comedy. He calls it ‘the lowest of all farces.’ He condemns the execution of the subject, rather than the ‘very vulgar’ subject itself. He could see in it neither moral nor edification. He allows that the situations are well managed, and make one laugh, in spite of the alleged grossness of the dialogue, the forced witticisms, and improbability of the whole plan and conduct. But, he adds, ‘what disgusts one most is, that though the characters are very low, and aim at low humour, not one of them says a sentence that is natural, or that marks any character at all. It is set up in opposition to sentimental comedy, and is as bad as the worst of them.’ Walpole’s supercilious censure reminds one of the company and of the dancing bear, alluded to in the scene over which Tony Lumpkin presides at the village alehouse. ‘I loves to hear the squire’ (Lumpkin) ‘sing,’ says one fellow, ‘bekase he never gives us anything that’s low!’ To which expression of good taste, an equally _nice_ fellow responds; ‘Oh, damn anything that’s low! I can’t bear it!’ Whereupon, the philosophical Mister Muggins very truly remarks: ‘The genteel thing is the genteel thing at any time, if so be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly.’ The humour culminates in the rejoinder of the bear-ward: ‘I like the maxim of it, Master Muggins. What though I’m obligated to dance a bear? A man may be a gentleman for all that. May this be my poison if my bear ever dances but to the very genteelest of tunes--“Water parted,” or the minuet in “Ariadne”.’ All this is low, in one sense, but it is far more full of humour than of vulgarity. The comedy of nature killed the sentimental comedies, which, for the most part, were as good (or as bad) as sermons. They strutted or staggered with sentiments on stilts, and were duller than tables of uninteresting statistics.