It has been said that Cibber wrote genteel comedy because he lived in the best society. If this assertion be true, the reader of his plays will decide that the best society of those days was unrefined and immoral, and that genteel comedy can be extremely vulgar. Cibber's dramas are coarse in incident, and often offensive in suggestion. The language is frequently gross, and even when he writes, or professes to write, with a moral purpose, his method may justly offend a rigid moralist. Moreover his comedy, like that of the dramatists of the Restoration, is of a wholly artificial type. Human nature has comparatively little place in it, and the fine ladies and gentlemen, the fops and fools who play their parts in his scenes, belong to a world which has no existence off the boards of the theatre. His one work which is still read by all students of the drama, and by many who are not students, is the _Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber_ (1740), which Dr. Johnson, who sneered at actors, allowed to be very entertaining. It is that, and something more, for it contains much just and generous criticism. Cibber was the author or adapter of about thirty plays, and in the latter vocation did not spare Shakespeare. [Sidenote: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762).] Letter writing, a delightful branch of literature, attained its highest excellence in the eighteenth century. It is an art which gains most, if the paradox may be allowed, by being artless. The carefully studied epistle, written with a view to publication, may have its value, but it cannot have the charm of a letter written in the familiar intercourse of friendship. It is the correspondence prompted by the heart which reaches the heart of the reader. The humour, the gaiety, the tenderness, and the chatty details that make a letter attractive, should be prompted by the feelings and events of the hour. Carefully constructed sentences and rhetorical flourishes ring hollow; to write for effect is to write badly, and to make a display of knowledge is to reveal an ignorance of the art.