‘Love’s Frailties’ came out in the beginning of 1794, at Covent-Garden. This play met with indifferent success, of which the principal cause was a supposed allusion to political subjects in some passages. One of these in particular excited the most violent resentment: ‘A sentence in itself so true,’ says Mr Holcroft, ‘as to have been repeated under a thousand different modes; and under a variety of forms and phraseology, to have been proverbial in all countries.’ This obnoxious passage was the one, in which Craig Campbell, when insulted by a fashionable coxcomb, who asks what profession he was bred to, says that ‘he was bred to the most useless, and often the most worthless, of all professions, that of a gentleman.’ In this comedy, the author has more pointedly than in any other, set up the claims of worth and virtue, against the arrogant assumptions of wealth and rank. That virtue alone confers true dignity, has however been the common-place theme of teachers of morality and religion, in all ages. But such at this time, was the irritation of party feeling, that to exhibit the force of this trite maxim on the stage, seems to have been regarded as an innovation on common sense, and as big with the seeds of social disorganisation. ‘The Deserted Daughter,’ ‘The Man of Ten Thousand,’ ‘The Force of Ridicule,’ and ‘Knave or Not,’ successively appeared in 1795, 1796, 1797, and 1798. The three last of these appeared at Drury-Lane. ‘The Deserted Daughter,’ and ‘He’s much to Blame,’ were acted at Covent-Garden.