This species of humour was not wanting in Sir Robert Howard,--who won his knighthood by valour displayed in saving Lord Wilmot's life in that hot affair at Cropredy Bridge. Sir Robert has been as much pommelled as patted by Dryden. Buckingham dragged him in effigy across the stage, and Shadwell ridiculed the universality of his pretensions by a clever caricature of him, in the "Impertinents," as Sir Positive Atall. For the King's purpose, Howard cajoled the Parliament out of money; for his own purpose, he cajoled the King out of both money and place; and netted several thousands a year by affixing his very legible signature to warrants, issued by him as Auditor of the Exchequer. The humour which he had in common with his brother James, he exhibited, by giving two opposite catastrophes to his "Vestal Virgin," between which the public were free to choose. Sir Robert has generally been looked upon as a servile courtier; but people were astounded at the courage displayed by him in his "Great Favourite, or the Duke of Lerma;" in which the naughtiness of the King's ways, and still more that of the women about him, was shown in a light which left no doubt as to the application of the satire. His bombastic periods have died away in the echoes of them which Fielding caught in his "Tom Thumb;" but his comic power is strongly and admirably manifested in his "Committee," a transcript of Puritan life, which--applied to Quakers, for want of better subjects for caricature--may still be witnessed in country theatres, in the farce of "Honest Thieves." Like many other satirists, Sir Robert could not detect his own weak points. In his "Blind Lady," he ridicules an old widow in desperate want of a seventh husband; and at threescore and ten, he himself married buxom Mistress Dives, one of the Maids of Honour to Queen Mary. Of comedies portraying national or individual follies, perhaps the most successful, and the most laughable, was James Howard's "English Monsieur," in which the hero-Englishman execrates everything that is connected with his country. To him an English meal is poison, and an English coat degradation. The English Monsieur once challenged a rash person who had praised an English dinner, and, says he, "I ran him through his mistaken palate, which made me think the hand of justice guided my sword." Is there a damp walk, along which the Gallo-Englishman passes--he can distinguish between the impressions previously left there by English or French ladies,--the footsteps of the latter being of course altogether the more fairy-like. "I have seen such _bonne mine_ in their footsteps, that the King of France's _maître de danse_ could not have found fault with any one tread amongst them all. In these walks," he adds, "I find the toes of English ladies ready to tread upon one another."