Etherege contributed three comedies to the stage:--"The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub," "She Would if She Could," and the "Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter." Sedley wrote the "Mulberry Garden;" a tragedy, called "Antony and Cleopatra," wherein a single incident in Shakspeare's play is spun out into five acts; "Bellamira," in which comedy, partly founded on the "Eunuchus" of Terence, he exhibited the frailty of Lady Castlemaine, and the audacity of Churchill--a translated drama from the French, called the "Grumbler," and a tragedy, entitled the "Tyrant King of Crete." Of all Sedley's pieces, the best is the "Mulberry Garden,"[53] for portions of which the author is indebted to Molière's "Ecole des Maris," and on which Pepys's criticism is not to be gainsayed:--"Here and there a pretty saying, and that not very many either." "Bellamira" is remembered only as the play, during the first representation of which the roof of the Theatre Royal fell in, with such just discrimination as to injure no one but the author. Sir Fleetwood Shepherd said that "the wit of the latter had blown the roof from the building." "Not so," rejoined Sedley, "the heaviness of the play has broke down the house, and buried the author in the ruins!" Etherege's comedies were, in their day, the dear delight of the majority of playgoers. I say the majority; for though "Love in a Tub" brought £1000 profit to Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, in a single month of 1664, and was acted before enraptured gallants and appreciating nymphs, at Whitehall, some found it a silly play. It gave Etherege a name and a position; and when his next comedy appeared, "She Would if She Could," a thousand anxious people, with leisure enough of an afternoon to see plays (it was only at Court that they were acted at night), were turned away from the doors. To me, this piece is very distasteful, and it is not without satisfaction I read that it was on the first night "barbarously treated," according to Dennis, and that Pepys found "nothing in the world good in it, and few people pleased with it." The plot and denouement he pronounces as "mighty insipid;" yet he says of the piece as a whole, that it was "dull, roguish, and witty." The actors, however, were not perfect on the first night. Dennis praised the truth of character, the purity, freedom, and grace of the dialogue; and Shadwell declared that it was the best comedy since the Restoration, to his own time. All this eulogy is not to be accepted. Etherege's third comedy, the "Man of Mode," has been described as "perhaps the most elegant comedy, and containing more of the real _manners_ of high life than any one the English stage was ever adorned with." In the latter respect alone is this description true; but, though the piece is dedicated to a lady, the Duchess of York, it could have afforded pleasure, as the _Spectator_ remarks, only to the impure. People, no doubt, were delighted to recognise Rochester in