One reason for the failure of Lillo's pioneering to arouse a larger following in tragedy was the possession which comedy had taken of both domestic sentiment and morality. The species of sentimental and tearful comedy, which had already by 1730 appeared in both England and France, soon flourished in both countries. Their vogue was diminished by the success of "She Stoops to Conquer" and "The Rivals," but there was a further development during the last thirty years of the century in the plays of Cumberland, Holcroft, Mrs. Inchbald, and others. A certain amount of low comedy was, after "The Rivals," admitted to be necessary, as Holcroft avows in the preface to "Duplicity," but in such plays as his "Duplicity" and "Road to Ruin," or Cumberland's "The Jew" and "The Wheel of Fortune," suffering abounds, ruin is imminent, there is much weeping, and a salient moral lesson. The suffering usually is confined to loss of fortune or temptation of virtue, and the moral lesson is directed against gaming, or loose living, or marital infidelity upon the part of the husband. The intriguing villain in this kind of play sinks to insignificance, and the moving force is likely to be a humanitarian benefactor who rescues the lost fortune or saves the heroine from the hated marriage. Occasionally this type of serious comedy comes close to tragedy. In Holcroft's "Deserted Daughter" (1795), a revamping of Cumberland's "Fashionable Lover," the father has disowned his daughter by his first marriage, and, through his wicked agent, she has been sent to a house of ill-fame. Not knowing his own daughter, the father, ruined in fortune and conscience, plans to aid a friend to secure her, and himself visits her. The situation is ghastly enough, but all comes out happily. The happy ending was in fact the dram of eale that corrupted the whole substance of this sentimental comedy. The theatrical necessity of a happy ending forbade either tragedy or a serious study of life. It compelled the dramatist to devote a large part of a play to preparing for the reconciliation, to spend much time on youthful love, to maintain a lightness of tone throughout; and it destroyed the possibility of tracing out character and incident to anything like a logical conclusion. The domestic drama, devoted to a serious presentation of social life, had its opportunity in the eighteenth as well as in the twentieth century. It shrank from tragedy; it advanced as far as attacking fashionable excesses, or as dramatizing moral theses, but it never got beyond the lovers who must be united and the everything that must come out well. It resigned itself to sentimentality and false conclusions, and was naturally overwhelmed by the theatrically more captivating sentimentality and falsity of Kotzebue. When "The London Merchant" and "The Gamester" encouraged the vogue of sentimental comedy, they nourished an ingrate which destroyed the legitimate brood of domestic tragedy. In the theatres men