In the prologue, tragedy was especially recommended to the patronage of ladies, because therein the character of women is exalted; while in the comedies of the day it was debased. But the epilogue, spoken by Miss Robinson, in boy's clothes--"born for this dapper age--pert, short, and clever"--showed that the poet did not much care for the female character. Jeffreys' "Merope" had no better success. His cousins of the Chandos family may have laughed at the young collegian's bathos; but on the second night there was not audience enough to make a laugh comfortable; and the curtain did not rise.[4] Critics complained that all tragic action on our stage turned on love; and Jeffreys contrived to make three couple of nymphs and swains sigh or swear in this story of mother and son! "Who could believe," says Voltaire, "that love could have been introduced into such a story? But, since the times of Charles II., love has taken possession of the English stage; and one must acknowledge that no nation in the world has painted that passion so badly." But Voltaire, you will remember, also said that Shakspeare was "a savage!" A Gloucestershire squire, named Tracy, tried his hand on "Periander," and failed, though he was guiltless of a false quantity; unlike Addison's learned friend, Frowde, who tripped in his penultimates, with the alacrity of Hughes! It was not altogether because our ancestors were weary of classical tragedies, that a short, fat, one-eyed, and well-to-do dissenter and jeweller, of Moorgate Street, reaped such a triumph, with his modern and domestic tragedy, "George Barnwell." _Mr._ Lillo had previously written a ballad-opera, "Sylvia;" but now he aimed to show the hideousness and consequence of vice. "George Barnwell" was first acted at Drury Lane, at the beginning of the Midsummer holidays of 1731. Theophilus Cibber played the hero; Mrs. Butler, Milwood. The audience looked for fun, and took the old ballad,--there was the flutter of a thousand copies in the house, to compare it with the play. Pope was present, and expressed an opinion that the language was often too elevated for the personages;[5] and the hearers thought only of the story as illustrated by Lillo, and every eye was weeping. It was the first fairly honest attempt made to amend, from the stage, the vices and weaknesses of mankind; and it certainly, in some degree, succeeded. It enlisted the sympathies of honest women. "The distresses of great personages," says a lady, in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, "have ceased to affect the town," and "none but a prostitute could find fault with this tragedy." Fault, however, was found; but the objection was answered in this way;--that "lowness of action was disallowed in a tragedy, but not lowness of character: the _circumstances_ here are all important." One critic holds the story to be improbable; but contemporary journals furnish a parallel. A mercer's apprentice, who sleeps in his master's shop, admits a