The occasional tendency in the theatre to revolt against the restraint of the action and to play lightly round it has its counterpart in criticism. What is it gives so peculiar a charm to the criticism of Dryden? Is it not his discursiveness, his little descriptive embellishments—as, for example, in the “Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” the river trip, the listening for the distant thunder of the Dutch guns “on that memorable day,” the moonlight on the water, the landing at Somerset Stairs among the crowd of French dancers? I have elsewhere said how Hazlitt’s theatrical criticisms lose in readableness by their strict attention to business, compared with his miscellaneous essays, where he permits himself to wander “all over the place.” George Henry Lewes’s theatrical criticisms can still be read with pleasure for the very reason that they were diversified with deliberate, almost frivolous irrelevancies. And then there was Jules Lemaître with his perpetual “moi,” which provoked the austere Brunetière to quote Pascal’s “_le moi est haïssable_.” Yet where will you find more enjoyable criticism than Lemaître’s? But I must keep off Lemaître and the charm of him, or I shall become, what he never was, tiresome. Even as it is, I may resemble the parson who said he had aimed at brevity in order to avoid tediousness, and was answered, “You _were_ brief, and you _were_ tedious.” “THE BEGGAR’S OPERA” One of Boswell’s projected works was a history of the controversy over _The Beggar’s Opera_. The best known of the works he actually did write contains several references to this controversy. Reynolds said it afforded a proof how strangely people will differ in opinion about a literary performance. Burke thought it had no merit. Johnson thought very much the opposite, but said characteristically, “There is in it such a labefactation of all principles as may be injurious to morality.” Gibbon suggested that it might refine the manners of highwaymen, “making them less ferocious, more polite—in short, more like gentlemen.” It is noteworthy that the work was half a century old when these observations were made about it. It had become a classic. And later generations treated it as a classic—that is to say, kept on refashioning it to the taste of their own time. The version, for instance, that Hazlitt was so fond of writing about (in the second decade of the last century) was a sad mangling of the original. Even so, it represented for Hazlitt the high-water mark of theatrical enjoyment, just as the original did for Boswell, who said, “No performance which the theatre exhibits delights me more.” You cannot take up a volume of Swift’s correspondence, or Horace Walpole’s or Arbuthnot’s, without mention of _The Beggar’s Opera_. It even got into Grimm. It was the _H.M.S. Pinafore_ of the time.