_Scin-Laeca_, the shining shadow adapted in a moment of peculiar inspiration by the late Lord Lytton. The Dramatist. But we have the plays, and who runs may read and admire. I say advisedly who runs may read, and not who will may see. Congreve's plays are, one can imagine, as dull in action as they are entertaining in print. They have dropped out of the _repertoire_, and the truth is they merit no better fate. They are only plays to the critic of style; to the actor and the average spectator they are merely so much spoken weariness. To begin with, they are marked by such a deliberate and immitigable baseness of morality as makes them impossible to man. Wycherley has done more vilely; Vanbrugh soars to loftier altitudes of filthiness. But neither Wycherley nor Vanbrugh has any strain of the admirable intellectual quality of Congreve. Villainy comes natural to the one, and beastliness drops from the other as easily as honey from the comb; but in neither is there evident that admirable effort of the intelligence which is a distinguishing characteristic of Congreve, and with neither is the result at once so consummate and so tame. For both Wycherley and Vanbrugh are playwrights, and Congreve is not. Congreve is only an artist in style writing for himself and half a dozen in the pit, while Wycherley and Vanbrugh--and for that matter Etherege and Farquhar--are playwrights producing for the whole theatre. In fact Congreve's plays were only successful in proportion as they were less literary and 'Congrevean.' His first comedy was the talk of the town; his last, _The Way of the World_, that monument of characterisation (of a kind) and fine English, was only a 'success of esteem.' The reason is not far to seek. Congreve's plays were too sordid in conception and too unamusing in effect for even the audiences to which they were produced; they were excellent literature, but they were bad drama, and they were innately detestable to boot. Audiences are the same in all strata of time; and it is easy to see that Wycherley's Horner and Vanbrugh's Sir John and Lady Brute were amusing, when Lady Wishfort and Sir Sampson Legend and the illustrious and impossible Maskwell were found 'old, cold, withered, and of intolerable entrails.' An audience, whatever its epoch, wants action; and still action, and again and for the last time action; also it wants a point of departure that shall be something tinctured with humanity, a touch of the human in the term of everything, and at least a 'sort of a kind of a strain' of humanity in the progress of events from the one point to the other. This it gets in Wycherley, brute as he is; with a far larger and more vigorous comic sense it gets the same in Vanbrugh; it gets it with a difference in the light-hearted indecencies of Farquhar. From the magnificent prose of Congreve it is absent. His it was to sublimate all that was most artificial in an artificial state of society: he was the