_Dick._ Ah, the cormorant [_Aside_].—Well, ’tis thine: thou’lt never thrive with it. _Brass._ When I find it begins to do me mischief, I’ll give it you again. But I must have a wedding suit. _Dick._ Well. _Brass._ A stock of linen. _Dick._ Enough. _Brass._ Not yet——a silver-hilted sword. _Dick._ Well, thou shalt have that too. Now thou hast every thing. _Brass._ Heav’n forgive me, I forgot a ring of remembrance. I would not forget all these favours for the world: a sparkling diamond will be always playing in my eye, and put me in mind of them. _Dick._ This unconscionable rogue! [_Aside_]—Well, I’ll bespeak one for thee. _Brass._ Brilliant. _Dick._ It shall. But if the thing don’t succeed after all— _Brass._ I am a man of honour and restore: and so, the treaty being finish’d, I strike my flag of defiance, and fall into my respects again.’ [_Takes off his hat._ The Confederacy is a comedy of infinite contrivance and intrigue, with a matchless spirit of impudence. It is a fine careless _exposé_ of heartless want of principle: for there is no anger or severity against vice expressed in it, as in Wycherley. The author’s morality in all cases (except his Provoked Wife, which was undertaken as a penance for past peccadillos) sits very loose upon him. It is a little upon the turn; ‘it does somewhat smack.’ Old Palmer, as Dick Amlet, asking his mother’s blessing on his knee, was the very idea of a graceless son.—His sweetheart Corinna is a Miss Prue, but nature works in her more powerfully.—Lord Foppington, in the Relapse, is a most splendid caricature: he is a personification of the foppery and folly of dress and external appearance in full feather. He blazes out and dazzles sober reason with ridiculous ostentation. Still I think this character is a copy from Etherege’s Sir Fopling Flutter, and upon the whole, perhaps, Sir Fopling is the more natural grotesque of the two. His soul is more in his dress; he is a more disinterested coxcomb. The lord is an ostentatious, strutting, vain-glorious blockhead: the knight is an unaffected, self-complacent, serious admirer of his equipage and person. For instance, what they severally say on the subject of contemplating themselves in the glass, is a proof of this. Sir Fopling thinks a looking-glass in the room ‘the best company in the world;’ it is another self to him: Lord Foppington merely considers it as necessary to adjust his appearance, that he may make a figure in company. The finery of the one has an imposing air of grandeur about it, and is studied for effect: the other is really in love with a laced suit, and is hand and glove with the newest-cut fashion. He really thinks his tailor or peruke-maker the greatest man in the world, while his lordship treats them familiarly as necessary appendages of his person. Still this coxcomb-nobleman’s