The morals of the piece are throughout the morals of the time--indelicacy, delicately expressed. Figaro hardly ever says anything _inconvenant_, but intrigue is in the very air he breathes. ‘The ripening fruit,’ writes Saint-Amand, ‘hanging on the tree, never falls but seems always on the point of falling.’ Virtue, of a kind, does triumph in the long run, but Beaumarchais knew his audience so well that up to the last moment he kept them fearing, or hoping, that it would not. If its unpleasant situations, and the character of the precocious page Cherubino (a particularly distasteful one to English ideas), gave spice to the wit in its own day, the modern reader can enjoy the sparkling and rippling stream of mocking gaiety without stirring up the mud it hides. One situation leads to another with the most complete naturalness, and yet that other is always perfectly unexpected. Moralisings and soliloquies, which spell ruin in other plays, are in this one rich in brilliancy and aptness. Those who as yet know ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ only by name, can purchase for a few pence one of the most exhilarating draughts of intellectual champagne ever given to the world. But it is not only as literature that the play lives. It _was_ the Revolution already in action. There are hardly six consecutive lines which do not contain some indictment against the old order; there is not an aphorism which does not push, with a laugh, some abuse down the abyss. ‘There is one thing more amazing than my play,’ said Beaumarchais, ‘and that is its success.’ He was right. One can but marvel still that the old order, so clearly hearing its sentence of death, took that sentence only as a stupendous joke, ‘laughed its last laugh’ over ‘Figaro,’ and applauded the warrant for its own execution till its hands tingled again. The fine ladies heard their vapours defined as ‘the malady that prevails only in boudoirs;’ and my lord, surrounded by sycophants, saw himself for a mocking second as other men see him, when Figaro says to Bazile: ‘Are you a Prince to be flattered? Hear the truth, wretch, since you have not the money to pay a liar.’ With what a roar of laughter that tribunal of censors who had licensed the play heard the words: ‘Provided I do not mention in my writings, authority, religion, politics, morality, officials ... or anyone who has a claim to anything, I can print everything freely under the inspection of two or three censors;’ and with what amused self-complacency it listened to the axiom: ‘Only little minds fear little writings.’