_Smith._ Why fill the stage? _Bayes._ O sir, because your heroic verse never sounds well but when the stage is full.' [Sidenote: Sir George Etheredge (1634-1691).] Sir George Etheredge is neither an edifying nor an attractive writer of comedy, but his plays are of considerable historical importance as prototypes of the comedy of manners afterwards so brilliantly developed by Congreve. They are _Love in a Tub_ (1664), _She Would if She Could_ (1668), and _The Man of Mode_ (1676). The last is celebrated for the character of Sir Fopling Flutter, who is said to have been the image of the author, though it is added on the same authority that his intention had been to depict himself in the character of the heartless rake Dorimant, whom others took for Rochester. All the plays suffer from a deficiency of plot, a deficiency of wit, and a superfluity of naughtiness, but cannot be denied to possess a light airy grace, and to have imbibed something of the manner, though little of the humour, of Molière. By his own account the author was lazy, careless, and a gamester. Little, except that 'he was knighted for marrying a fortune,' is known of his history until 1685, when, unexpectedly to himself, he was appointed envoy to Ratisbon, and details become copious from the accidental preservation of his letter-book, now in the British Museum. The general tone of his correspondence is good-natured and easy; he seems to have made just the kind of ambassador to be expected from an idle man of fashion without diplomatic experience; while he may well have merited his friends' description of him as 'gentle George,' and his repute as easy and generous. The Revolution deprived him of his post; he seems to have refused allegiance to William, and to have died at Paris in 1691. FOOTNOTES: [7] Crowne himself assigns another reason, which may have had weight in some quarters: 'I presume your ladyship nauseates comedies. They are so ill-bred, and saucy with quality, and always crammed with our odious sex. At tragedies the house is all lined with beauty, and then a gentleman may endure it,'--a confirmation of the statement that modest women avoided the comic theatre, or went masked. CHAPTER VI. THE LATER COMEDY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. Etheredge's comedies serve to introduce one of the most brilliant schools of English comic writing--faulty, in that so far from correcting the manners of its age, it did not even portray them, but eminent above the English comedy of every other period for wit. So great is the family likeness between its chief representatives, that it will be advisable to consider their lives and their writings together. The connecting link among them all is that all were fine gentlemen whose code was the fashionable morality of the day. Any conclusions as to the state of contemporary manners which may be deduced from their writings must be confined to this small, though conspicuous section of English society.