_Lady Froth._ Well, you shall hear.--Let me see. [_Reads._ For as the sun shines every day, So, of our coachman I may say, He shows his drunken fiery face, Just as the sun does, more or less. _Brisk._ That's right, all's well, all's well!--More or less. _Lady Froth._ [_Reads._] And when at night his labour's done, Then too, like heaven's charioteer the sun-- Ay, charioteer does better. Into the dairy he descends, And there his whipping and his driving ends; There's he's secure from danger of a bilk, His fare is paid him, and he sets in milk. For Susan, you know, is Thetis, and so-- _Brisk._ Incomparably well and proper, egad!--But I have one exception to make:--don't you think _bilk_ (I know it's good rhyme), but don't you think _bilk_ and _fare_ too like a hackney-coachman? _Lady Froth._ I swear and vow, I am afraid so.--And yet our Jehu was a hackney-coachman when my lord took him. _Brisk._ Was he? I'm answered, if Jehu was a hackney-coachman.--You may put that in the marginal notes though, to prevent criticism.--Only mark it with a small asterism, and say, Jehu was formerly a hackney-coachman. _Lady Froth._ I will; you'd oblige me extremely to write notes to the whole poem. _Brisk._ With all my heart and soul, and proud of the vast honour, let me perish!' Congreve excels not only in dialogue, but in painting a character by a single speech. How thoroughly we realize the inward and outward man of old Foresight the omen-monger, from a single passage in _Love for Love_: '_Nurse._ Pray heaven send your worship good luck! marry and amen with all my heart; for you have put on one stocking with the wrong side outward. _Fore._ Ha! hm? faith and troth I'm glad of it. And so I have; that may be good luck in troth, in troth it may, very good luck: nay I have had some omens: I got out of bed backwards too this morning, without premeditation; pretty good that too; but then I stumbled coming down stairs, and met a weasel; bad omens these, some bad, some good, our lives are chequered; mirth and sorrow, want and plenty, night and day, make up our time. But in troth I am pleased at my stocking; very well pleased at my stocking.' Or Mr. Bluffe, the _miles gloriosus_ of _The Old Bachelor_: