The City Heiress is most manifestly borrowed from two main sources. Sir Anthony Meriwill and Charles are Durazzo and Caldoro from Massinger’s _The Guardian_ (licensed 31 October, 1633, 8vo, 1655). Mrs. Behn has transferred to her play even small details and touches. The burglary, that most wonderful of all burglaries, is taken and improved from Middleton’s _A Mad World, My Masters_ (4to, 1608), Act ii, where Sir Bounteous Progress is robbed by Dick Folly-Wit, his grandson, in precisely the same way as Sir Timothy is choused by Tom. On 4 February, 1715, Charles Johnson produced at Drury Lane his _The Country Lasses; or, The Custom of the Manor_, a rifacimento of Fletcher’s _The Custom of the Country_ and _The City Heiress_. It is a well-written, lively enough comedy, but very weak and anaemic withal when compared to Mrs. Behn. B. G. Stephenson, in his vivacious libretto to Cellier’s tuneful opera, _Dorothy_, produced at the Gaiety Theatre, 25 September, 1886, has made great use of Johnson’s play, especially Act i, where the gallants meet the two ladies disguised as country girls; the duel scenes of Act v; and the pseudo-burglary of Act iii. He even gives his comic sheriff’s officer the name of Lurcher, who in Johnson is the rackety nephew that tricks his hospitable old uncle, Sir John English. The _Biographia Dramatica_ states that Mrs. Behn ‘introduced into this play (_The City Heiress_) a great part of the _Inner Temple Masque_ by Middleton.’ This charge is absolutely unfounded, and it would not be uninteresting to know how so complete an error arose. The two have nothing in common. It must be allowed that Mrs. Behn has displayed such wit and humour as amply to justify her plagiarisms. Sir Timothy Treat-all himself is, of course, Shaftesbury almost without disguise. There are a thousand telling hits at the President of the Council and his vices. He was also bitterly satirized in many other plays. In Nevil Payne’s _The Siege of Constantinople_ (1675) he appears as The Chancellor; 1680 in Otway’s Shakespearean cento cum bastard classicism _Caius Marius_ some very plain traits can be recognized in the grim Marius senior; in Southerne’s _The Loyal Brother_ (1682) Ismael, a villainous favourite; in _Venice Preserved_ (1682) the lecherous Antonio; in the same year Banks caricatured him as a quite unhistorical Cardinal Wolsey, _Virtue Betray’d; or, Anna Bullen_; in Crowne’s mordant _City Politics_ (1683) the Podesta of a most un-Italian Naples; the following year Arius the heresiarch in Lee’s _Constantine the Great_; in the operatic _Albion and Albanius_ (1685), Dryden does not spare even physical infirmities and disease with the crudest yet cruellest exhibition, and five years later he attacked his old enemy once more as Benducar in that great tragedy _Don Sebastian_. THEATRICAL HISTORY.