It is the first of these, the witticism existing for its own sake and sufficient with itself, detachable from the dialog, not integrated with either character or situation, merely a merry jest at large, it is verbal glitter of this sort which is essentially juvenile, which we may expect in the piece of ’prentice playwrights and which we find in the early comedies of Shakspere; more especially in ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost.’ Thomas Moore, in his brilliant biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, called attention to the fact that English comedy, from the ‘Way of the World’ to the ‘School for Scandal,’ was the work of young men, who either died before they attained intellectual maturity or abandoned the theater; and in the juvenility of these comic playwrights, from Congreve to Sheridan, we can see the explanation and the excuse for the verbal fireworks which explode all down their dialog. So the younger Dumas was under thirty when he wrote the ‘Demi-Monde’ with its elaborately paraded epigram; and he was over fifty when he composed ‘Françillon’ with its dialog bathed in wit and yet devoid of detachable dewdrops. So Oscar Wilde left us only the comedies composed when he was comparatively youthful; and he had perforce to give up playwriting before he had attained to artistic sincerity. His epigrams, often amusing in themselves, are half of them taken out of his note-book to be tacked arbitrarily into his dialog. They may glitter like spangles but they are only sewed on. The built up repartees and the manufactured retorts of Wilde’s characters are sometimes too rude to be probable in the polite society which the author took a snobbish pride in putting into his plays; but at least they lacked the bare brutality of the rejoinders we find in Congreve’s comedies and more particularly in Wycherly’s, rejoinders which recall Goldsmith’s criticism of Johnson as a conversationalist, that “whenever the doctor’s pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt.”