Although there are undoubtedly considerable distinctions between the works of these four dramatists, such a fundamental unity nevertheless prevails among them that they may be advantageously considered together. They may be compared to a jewel with four facets, each casting a separate ray, but with little diversity in their cold brilliant glitter. Wit, gaiety, heartlessness, and profligacy are the common notes of them all, save that Congreve has tragic power, and, as well as Farquhar, real feeling. How far they painted, or intended to paint, the manners of their age, is a difficult question. Lamb thought that the world they depict was merely conventional, a Lampsacene Arcadia. Not even the indulgent Leigh Hunt, much less the austere Macaulay, can concur in this judgment, which is assuredly much too absolute. Yet it is indisputable that the manners they portray were not those of a nation that devoured _Pilgrim's Progress_, brought up children and domestics by the _Whole Duty of Man_, and deposed a king who meddled with the Church. Were they even the manners of the gay world? To some extent this is true; but there is evidence enough that even fashionable men thought of something else than seducing their neighbours' wives and daughters; that the slips even of fashionable women were by no means inordinately frequent or mere matters of course; and that the standard of personal honour was much higher than would appear from the comedies. We may be assisted to comprehend the real state of the matter by observing the condition of the French literature of fiction at this very moment. Anyone who should form his opinion of French people entirely from their novels could come to no other conclusion than that they were entirely given up to the pursuit of illicit love, and deemed nothing else worthy of the attention of a rational creature. Yet we know that as a matter of fact the French nation does think of very different things; that a ridiculously small corner of actual life is conventionally made to stand for the whole of it; that the novels which profess to depict manners, while accurate in their delineation of certain characters and certain phases, would entirely mislead those whose notions should be solely derived from them. It would be nearer the truth, though still erroneous, to take the reverse view, and maintain that works composed for the sake of amusement are more likely to usher the reader into an ideal world than to weary him with familiar scenes and incidents. So far as this is the case, the English society of the seventeenth century must be acquitted at the expense of the dramatists, who incur the obloquy of missing both the two great ends of comedy, for they neither delineate nor correct it. Possibly the unsatisfactory position which writers of so much wit and sense thus came to occupy may be partly accounted for by the influence of Ben Jonson. We have seen Dryden almost hesitating to avow his