A great part of this lecture is taken from two papers in The Examiner, republished in The Round Table. See vol. I. pp. 25-31, and notes thereon.

133.

Hogarth. William Hogarth (1697-1764).

 

‘Instinct in every part.’ Cf. ‘Instinct through all proportions low and high.’ Paradise Lost, XI. 562.

 

‘Other pictures we see, Hogarth’s we read.’ ‘Other pictures we look at,—his prints we read.’ Lamb’s Essay on the Genius and Character of Hogarth, referred to below, p. 138.

 

Not long ago. In 1814.

134.

‘Of amber-lidded snuff-box,’ etc. Pope’s Rape of the Lock, IV. 123.

134.

‘A person, and a smooth dispose,’ etc. Othello, Act I. Sc. 3.

 

‘Vice loses half,’ etc. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 89).

137.

‘All the mutually reflected charities.’ Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 40).

 

‘Frequent and full,’ etc. Paradise Lost, I. 795-7.

138.

Mr. Lamb’s Essay. Published in The Reflector (1811) and reprinted in Poems, Plays and Essays (ed. Ainger).

 

What distinguishes, etc. The remainder of the lecture from this point had not appeared in The Examiner or The Round Table.

139.

Mr. Wilkie. David Wilkie (1785-1841), Royal Academician 1811, knighted 1836.

 

Teniers. David Teniers, the younger (1610-1690).

 

‘To shew vice,’ etc. Adapted from Hamlet, Act III. Sc. 2.

140.

‘The very error of the time.’ Cf. ‘The very error of the moon,’ Othello, Act V. Sc. 2.

 

‘Your lungs,’ etc. As You Like It, Act II. Sc. 7.

 

Bagnigge Wells. Sadler’s Wells. Hazlitt refers to Hogarth’s ‘Evening,’ one of the four ‘Times of Day.’

142.

Parson Ford. Johnson’s cousin, Cornelius Ford. See Boswell’s Life of Johnson (ed. G. B. Hill), i. 49. The figure in Hogarth’s picture has also been identified with ‘Orator’ Henley.

143.

‘Die of a rose,’ etc. Pope, Essay on Man, 1, 200.

 

In the manner of Ackerman’s dresses for May. Moore, Horace, Ode XI., Lib. 2. Freely translated by the Pr—ce R—g—t.

144.

‘The Charming Betsy Careless.’ See the last of the series of ‘The Rake’s Progress,’ the scene in Bedlam. One of the lunatics has scratched the name on the bannisters.

 

‘Stray-gifts of love and beauty.’ Wordsworth, Stray Pleasures.

145.

Sir Joshua Reynolds. See Table-Talk, vol. VI. p. 131 et seq.

146.

‘Conformed to this world,’ etc. Romans, xii. 2.

 

‘Give to airy nothing,’ etc. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V. Sc. 1.

 

‘Ignorant present.’ Macbeth, Act I. Sc. 5.

 

Note. ‘Nay, nay,’ etc. ‘Na, na! not that way, not that way, the head to the east.’ Guy Mannering, chap. 55.

148.

It is many years since, etc. About 1798, at St. Neots, in Huntingdonshire. Cf. the essay ‘On Going a Journey’ in Table-Talk, vol. VI. p. 185.

 

‘How was I then uplifted.’ Troilus and Cressida, Act III. Sc. 2.

 

‘Temples not made with hands,’ etc. 2 Corinthians, V. 1.

 

In the Louvre. In 1802, when the Louvre still contained the spoils of Buonaparte’s conquests. Cf. Table-Talk, vol. VI. pp. 15 et seq. and notes thereon.

 

‘All eyes shall see me,’ etc. Cf. Romans, xiv. 11.

149.

There ‘stood the statue,’ etc. ‘So stands the statue that enchants the world.’ Thomson, The Seasons, Summer, 1347. The statue is the Venus of Medici.

 

‘There was old Proteus,’ etc. Wordsworth’s Sonnet, ‘The world is too much with us,’ adapted.

 

The stay, the guide, etc. An unacknowledged quotation from Wordsworth’s Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, 109-110.

 

‘Smoothed the raven down,’ etc. Comus, 251.

Much of the early part of this Lecture is taken from a paper in The Examiner (Aug. 20, 1815), republished in The Round Table. See vol. I. pp. 10-14, and notes.

PAGE

 

150.

‘Where it must live,’ etc. Othello, Act II. Sc. 4.

 

‘To see ourselves,’ etc. Burns, To a Louse.

151.

‘Present no mark to the foeman.’ Henry IV., Part II., Act III. Sc. 2. Wars should be Shadow.

152.

The authority of Sterne, etc. See Tristram Shandy, I. 21.

 

l. 22. In the third edition a passage is interpolated from Hazlitt’s letter to The Morning Chronicle, Oct. 15, 1813.

 

‘The ring,’ etc. Pope, Moral Essays, III. 309-10.

 

Angelica, etc. All these characters are in Congreve’s Love for Love.

 

The compliments which Pope paid to his friends. Cf. the essay ‘On Persons one would wish to have seen,’ where some of these compliments are quoted.

153.

The loves of the plants and the triangles. Erasmus Darwin’s poem ‘The Loves of the Plants’(1789) was the subject of Canning’s famous parody ‘The Loves of the Triangles’ in The Anti-Jacobin.

 

Berinthias and Alitheas. Berinthia in Vanbrugh’s The Relapse; Alithea in Wycherley’s The Country Wife.

 

Beppo, etc. Lord Byron’s Beppo (1818), Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), Scott’s Lady of the Lake (1810). Madame De Staël’s Corinne appeared in 1807.

 

l. 17. In the third edition a long passage from Hazlitt’s letter to The Morning Chronicle is here inserted.

 

‘That sevenfold fence.’ See note to vol. I. p. 13, and cf. A Reply to Malthus, vol. IV. p. 101.

154.

‘Mr. Smirk, you are a brisk man.’ Foote’s The Minor, Act II.

 

‘Almost afraid to know itself.’ Macbeth, Act IV. Sc. 3.

 

Mr. Farren. William Farren (1786-1861). Lord Ogleby in Colman and Garrick’s The Clandestine Marriage was one of his best parts.

 

Note. See vol. I. p. 313.

155.

Jeremy Collier. Jeremy Collier’s (1650-1726) Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage appeared in March 1697-8.

 

Mrs. Centlivre. Susannah Centlivre (1667?-1723). The Busy Body appeared in 1709, The Wonder in 1714.

156.

The scene near the end. The Wonder, Act V. Sc. 2.

 

‘Roast me these Violantes.’ Ibid. Act II. Sc. 1.

156.

In the third edition the following account of The Busy Body, taken from Oxberry’s The New English Drama (Vol. VI.) is inserted:

 

‘“The Busy Body” is a comedy that has now held possession of the stage above a hundred years (the best test of excellence); and the merit that has enabled it to do so, consists in the ingenuity of the contrivance, the liveliness of the plot, and the striking effect of the situations. Mrs. Centlivre, in this and her other plays, could do nothing without a stratagem; but she could do everything with one. She delights in putting her dramatis personæ continually at their wit’s end, and in helping them off with a new evasion; and the subtlety of her resources is in proportion to the criticalness of the situation and the shortness of the notice for resorting to an expedient. Twenty times, in seeing or reading one of her plays, your pulse beats quick, and you become restless and apprehensive for the event; but with a fine theatrical sleight of hand, she lets you off, undoes the knot of the difficulty, and you breathe freely again, and have a hearty laugh into the bargain. In short, with her knowledge of chambermaids’ tricks, and insight into the intricate foldings of lovers’ hearts, she plays with the events of comedy, as a juggler shuffles about a pack of cards, to serve his own purposes, and to the surprise of the spectator. This is one of the most delightful employments of the dramatic art. It costs nothing—but a voluntary tax on the inventive powers of the author; and it produces, when successfully done, profit and praise to one party, and pleasure to all. To show the extent and importance of theatrical amusements (which some grave persons would decry altogether, and which no one can extol too highly), a friend of ours,^[49] whose name will be as well known to posterity as it is to his contemporaries, was not long ago mentioning, that one of the earliest and most memorable impressions ever made on his mind, was the seeing “Venice Preserved” acted in a country town when he was only nine years old. But he added, that an elderly lady who took him to see it, lamented, notwithstanding the wonder and delight he had experienced, that instead of “Venice Preserved,” they had not gone to see “The Busy Body,” which had been acted the night before. This was fifty years ago, since which, and for fifty years before that, it has been acted a thousand times in town and country, giving delight to the old, the young, and middle-aged, passing the time carelessly, and affording matter for agreeable reflection afterwards, making us think ourselves, and wish to be thought, the men equal to Sir George Airy in grace and spirit, the women to Miranda and Isabinda in love and beauty, and all of us superior to Marplot in wit. Among the scenes that might be mentioned in this comedy, as striking instances of happy stage effect, are Miranda’s contrivance to escape from Sir George, by making him turn his back upon her to hear her confession of love, and the ludicrous attitude in which he is left waiting for the rest of her speech after the lady has vanished; his offer of the hundred pounds to her guardian to make love to her in his presence, and when she receives him in dumb show, his answering for both; his situation concealed behind the chimney-screen; his supposed metamorphosis into a monkey, and his deliverance from thence in that character by the interference of Marplot; Mrs. Patch’s sudden conversion of the mysterious love letter into a charm for the toothache, and the whole of Marplot’s meddling and blunders. The last character is taken from Dryden and the Duchess of Newcastle; and is, indeed, the only attempt at character in the play. It is amusing and superficial. We see little of the puzzled perplexity of his brain, but his actions are absurd enough. He whiffles about the stage with considerable volubility, and makes a very lively automaton. Sir George Airy sets out for a scene or two in a spirited manner, but afterwards the character evaporates in the name; and he becomes as commonplace as his friend Charles, who merely laments over his misfortunes, or gets out of them by following the suggestions of his valet or his valet’s mistress. Miranda is the heroine of the piece, and has a right to be so; for she is a beauty and an heiress. Her friend has less to recommend her; but who can refuse to fall in love with her name? What volumes of sighs, what a world of love, is breathed in the very sound alone—the letters that form the charming name of Isabinda.’

157.

‘The one cries Mum,’ etc. The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 5. Sc. 2.

 

Note. See first edition (1714), pp. 35-6.

158.

‘‘Some soul of goodness,’ etc. Henry V., Act IV. Sc. 1.

 

His Funeral. Produced in 1701.

 

‘All the milk of human kindness.’ Macbeth, Act I. Sc. 5.

 

The Conscious Lovers. 1722. Hazlitt refers to Act III. Sc. 1.

 

Parson Adams against me. See Joseph Andrews, Book III. chap. II.

 

Addison’s Drummer. 1715.

 

‘An Hour after Marriage.’ Three Hours after Marriage (1717), the joint production of Gay, Pope, and Arbuthnot.

 

‘An alligator stuff’d.’ Romeo and Juliet, Act V. Sc. 1.

 

Gay’s What-d’ye-call-it. 1715.

 

‘Polly.’ Published in 1728. The representation was forbidden by the Court.

 

Last line but one. In the third edition Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Beggar’s Opera’ (see vol. I. pp. 65-6) is here introduced.

159.

The Mock Doctor. 1732.

 

Tom Thumb. Afterwards called The Tragedy of Tragedies, or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1730; additional Act, 1731).

 

Lord Grizzle. In Tom Thumb.

 

‘‘Like those hanging locks,’ etc. Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, Act I. Sc. 2.

 

‘Fell of hair,’ etc. Macbeth, Act V. Sc. 5.

 

‘Hey for Doctor’s Commons.’ Tragedy of Tragedies, etc., Act II. Sc. 5.

 

‘From the sublime,’ etc. See ante, note to p. 23.

 

Lubin Log. In James Kenney’s farce, Love, Law, and Physic, produced 1812. See ante, p. 192.

 

The Widow’s Choice. Allingham’s Who Wins, or The Widow’s Choice, 1808.

 

‘Is high fantastical.’ Twelfth Night, Act I. Sc. 1.

160.

The hero of the Dunciad. Cibber was substituted for Theobald as the King of Dulness in consequence of his famous letter to Pope, published in 1742.

 

‘By merit raised,’ etc. Paradise Lost, II. 5-6.

 

His Apology for his own Life. Published in 1740. Cf. The Round Table, vol. I. pp. 156-7.

 

His account of his waiting, etc. An Apology, etc., 2nd ed. 1740, chap. III. pp. 59-60.

 

Mr. Burke’s celebrated apostrophe. Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 89).

 

Kynaston, etc. See vol. I. notes to pp. 156-7.

161.

His Careless Husband. 1704.

 

His Double Gallant. 1707. The play was revived in 1817 and noticed by Hazlitt. See ante, pp. 359-362.

 

‘In hidden mazes,’ etc. Misquoted from L’Allegro, 141-2.

162.

His Nonjuror. 1717. Isaac Bickerstaff’s The Hypocrite was produced in 1768.

 

Love’s Last Shift. Colley Cibber’s first play, produced in 1694. For Southerne’s remark to Cibber, see An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, p. 173.

 

l. 34. In the third edition a great part of Hazlitt’s article on The Hypocrite (see A View of the English Stage, ante, p. 245) is inserted here. The passage is also in Oxberry’s New English Drama, vol. I.

 

Love in a Riddle. 1729.

163.

The Suspicious Husband, 1747, The Jealous Wife, 1761, The Clandestine Marriage, 1766.

 

l. 15. In the third edition the following passage on The Jealous Wife, taken from Oxberry’s The New English Drama (Vol. I.) is here inserted:—

 

‘Colman, the elder, was the translator of Terence: and the “Jealous Wife” is a classical play. The plot is regular, the characters well supported, and the moral the best in the world. The dialogue has more sense than wit. The ludicrous arises from the skilful development of the characters, and the absurdities they commit in their own persons, rather than from the smart reflections which are made upon them by others. Thus nothing can be more ridiculous or more instructive than the scenes of which Mrs. Oakly is the heroine, yet they are all serious and unconscious: she exposes herself to our contempt and ridicule by the part she acts, by the airs she gives herself, and the fantastic behaviour in the situations in which she is placed. In other words, the character is pure comedy, not satire. Congreve’s comedies for the most part are satires, in which, from an exuberance of wit, the different speakers play off the sharp-pointed raillery on one another’s foibles, real or supposed. The best and most genuine kind of comedy, because the most dramatic, is that of character or humour, in which the persons introduced upon the stage are left to betray their own folly by their words and actions. The progressive winding up of the story of the present comedy is excellently managed. The jealousy and hysteric violence of Mrs. Oakly increase every moment, as the pretext for them becomes more and more frivolous. The attention is kept alive by our doubts about Oakly’s wavering (but in the end triumphant) firmness; and the arch insinuations and well-concerted home-thrusts of the Major heighten the comic interest of the scene. There is only one circumstance on which this veteran bachelor’s freedom of speech might have thrown a little more light, namely, that the married lady’s jealousy is in truth only a pretence for the exercise of her domineering spirit in general; so that we are left at last in some uncertainty as to the turn which this humour may take, and as to the future repose of her husband, though the affair of Miss Russet is satisfactorily cleared up. The under-plot of the two lovers is very ingeniously fitted into the principal one, and is not without interest in itself. Charles Oakly is a spirited, well-meaning, thoughtless young fellow, and Harriet Russet is an amiable romantic girl, in that very common, but always romantic situation—in love. Her persecution from the addresses of Lord Trinket and Sir Harry Beagle fans the gentle flame which had been kindled just a year before in her breast, produces the adventures and cross-purposes of the plot, and at last reconciles her to, and throws her into the arms of her lover, in spite of her resentment for his misconduct and apparent want of delicacy. The figure which Lord Trinket and Lady Freelove make in the piece is as odious and contemptible as it is possible for people in that class of life (and for no others) to make. The insolence, the meanness, the affectation, the hollowness, the want of humanity, sincerity, principle, and delicacy, are such as can only be found where artificial rank and station in society supersede not merely a regard to propriety of conduct, but the necessity even of an attention to appearances. The morality of the stage has (we are ready to hope) told in that direction as well as others, has, in some measure suppressed the suffocating pretensions and flaunting affectation of vice and folly in “persons of honour,” and, as it were, humanised rank and file. The pictures drawn of the finished depravity of such characters in high life, in the old comedies and novels, can hardly have been thrown away upon the persons themselves, any more than upon the world at large. Little Terence O’Cutler, the delicious protégé of Lord Trinket and Lady Freelove, is a fit instrument for them to use, and follows in the train of such principals as naturally and assuredly as their shadow. Sir Harry Beagle is a coarse, but striking character of a thorough-bred fox-hunting country squire. He has but one idea in his head, but one sentiment in his heart—and that is his stud. This idea haunts his imagination, tinges or imbues every other object, and accounts for his whole phraseology, appearance, costume, and conduct. Sir Harry’s ruling passion is varied very ingeniously, and often turned to a very ludicrous account. There is a necessary monotony in the humour, which arises from a want of more than one idea, but the obviousness of the jest almost makes up for the recurrence of it; if the means of exciting mirth are mechanical, the effect is sure; and to say that a hearty laugh is cheaply purchased, is not a serious objection against it. When an author is terribly conscious of plagiarism, he seldom confesses it; when the obligation does not press his conscience, he sometimes does. Colman, in the advertisement to the first edition of the “Jealous Wife,” apologises for the freedom which he has used in borrowing from “Tom Jones.” In reading this modest excuse, though we have seen the play several times, we could not imagine what part of the plot was taken from Fielding. We did not suspect that Miss Russet was Sophia Western, and that old Russet and Sir Harry Beagle between them somehow represented Squire Western and young Blifil. But so it is! The outline of the plot and some of the characters are certainly the same, but the filling up destroys the likeness. There is all in the novel that there is in the play, but there is so much in the novel that is not in the play, that the total impression is quite different, and loses even an appearance of resemblance. In the same manner, though a profile or a shade of a face is exactly the same as the original, we with difficulty recognise it from the absence of so many other particulars. Colman might have kept his own secret, and no one would have been the wiser for it.’

163.

The elder Colman’s translation of Terence. Published in 1765.

 

Bickerstaff’s plays. Love in a Village, 1763, The Maid of the Mill, 1765, and The Hypocrite are the best known.

 

Mrs. Cowley’s comedy, etc. Hannah Cowley’s (1743?-1809) The Belle’s Stratagem appeared in 1780, Who’s the Dupe? in 1779.

164.

Goldsmith’s Good-natured Man, 1768; She Stoops to Conquer, 1773.

 

In the third edition the following account of She Stoops to Conquer from Oxberry’s The New English Drama (Vol. IV.) is here inserted:—

 

‘It, however, bears the stamp of the author’s genius, which was an indefinable mixture of the original and imitative. His plot, characters, and incidents are all apparently new; and yet, when you come to look into them, they are all old, with little variation or disguise: that is, the author sedulously avoided the beaten, vulgar path, and sought for singularity, but found it rather in the unhackneyed and eccentric inventions of those who had gone before him, than in his own stores. The “Vicar of Wakefield,” which abounds more than any of his works in delightful and original traits, is still very much borrowed, in its general tone and outline, from Fielding’s “Joseph Andrews.” Again, the characters and adventures of Tony Lumpkin, and the ridiculous conduct of his mother, in the present comedy, are a counterpart (even to the incident of the theft of the jewels) of those of the Widow Blackacre and her booby son in Wycherley’s “Plain Dealer.”

 

‘This sort of plagiarism, which gives us a repetition of new and striking pictures of human life, is much to be preferred to the dull routine of trite, vapid, every-day common-places; but it is more dangerous, as the stealing of pictures or family plate, where the property can be immediately identified, is more liable to detection than the stealing of bank-notes, or the current coin of the realm. Dr. Johnson’s sarcasm against some writer, that his “singularity was not his excellence,” cannot be applied to Goldsmith’s writings in general; but we are not sure whether it might not in severity be applied to “She Stoops to Conquer.” The incidents and characters are many of them exceedingly amusing; but they are so, a little at the expense of probability and bienseance. Tony Lumpkin is a very essential and unquestionably comic personage; but certainly his absurdities or his humours fail of none of their effect for want of being carried far enough. He is in his own sex what a hoyden is in the other. He is that vulgar nickname, a hobbety-hoy, dramatised; forward and sheepish, mischievous and idle, cunning and stupid, with the vices of the man and the follies of the boy; fond of low company, and giving himself all the airs of consequence of the young squire. His vacant delight in playing at cup and ball, and his impenetrable confusion and obstinate gravity in spelling the letter, drew fresh beauties from Mr. Liston’s face. Young Marlow’s bashfulness in the scenes with his mistress is, when well acted, irresistibly ludicrous; but still nothing can quite overcome our incredulity as to the existence of such a character in the present day, and in the rank of life, and with the education which Marlow is supposed to have had. It is a highly amusing caricature, a ridiculous fancy, but no more. One of the finest and most delicate touches of character is in the transition from the modest gentleman’s manner with his mistress, to the easy and agreeable tone of familiarity with the supposed chambermaid, which was not total and abrupt, but exactly such in kind and degree as such a character of natural reserve and constitutional timidity would undergo from the change of circumstances. Of the other characters in the piece, the most amusing are Tony Lumpkin’s associates at the Three Pigeons; and of these we profess the greatest partiality for the important showman who declares that “his bear dances to none but the genteelest of tunes, ‘Water parted from the Sea,’ or the minuet in ‘Ariadne’!”^[50] This is certainly the “high-fantastical”^[51] of low comedy.’

164.

Murphy’s plays, etc. Arthur Murphy’s (1730-1805) All in the Wrong, 1761, and Know Your Own Mind, 1778.

 

Both his principal pieces, etc. There seems to be some inaccuracy here. Colman’s Jealous Wife was produced in February 1761, Murphy’s All in the Wrong in June of the same year. The School for Scandal, however, appeared a month later than Murphy’s Know Your Own Mind, viz., in May 1777.

 

The School for Scandal, 1777, The Rivals, 1775, The Duenna, 1775, and The Critic, 1779.

 

Cumberland. Richard Cumberland (1732-1811), the dramatist, whose West Indian (1771) and The Wheel of Fortune (1795) are referred to below, p. 166.

 

‘Dragged the struggling,’ etc. Goldsmith, The Traveller, l. 190.

165.

Miss Farren. Elizabeth Farren (1759?-1829), Countess of Derby. She played Lady Teazle on the occasion of her last appearance, April 8, 1797.

 

Matthew Bramble and his sister. In Humphry Clinker.

 

‘He had damnable iteration in him.’ Henry IV., Part I., Act I. Sc. 2.

 

165, l. 36. In the third edition Hazlitt’s description of The Rivals, from Oxberry’s The New English Drama (Vol. I.) is inserted here:—

 

‘The “Rivals” is one of the most agreeable comedies we have. In the elegance and brilliancy of the dialogue, in a certain animation of moral sentiment, and in the masterly dénouement of the fable, the “School for Scandal” is superior; but the “Rivals” has more life and action in it, and abounds in a greater number of whimsical characters, unexpected incidents, and absurd contrasts of situation. The effect of the “School for Scandal” is something like reading a collection of epigrams, that of the “Rivals” is more like reading a novel. In the first you are always at the toilette or in the drawing-room; in the last you pass into the open air, and take a turn in King’s Mead. The interest is kept alive in the one play by smart repartees, in the other by startling rencontres: in the one we laugh at the satirical descriptions of the speakers, in the other the situation of their persons on the stage is irresistibly ludicrous. Thus the interviews between Lucy and Sir Lucius O’Trigger, between Acres and his friend Jack, who is at once his confidant and his rival; between Mrs. Malaprop and the lover of her niece as Captain Absolute, and between the young lady and the same person as the pretended Ensign Beverley, tell from the mere double entendre of the scene, and from the ignorance of the parties of one another’s persons and designs. There is no source of dramatic effect more complete than this species of practical satire (in which our author seems to have been an adept), where one character in the piece is made a fool of and turned into ridicule to his face, by the very person whom he is trying to over-reach.

 

‘There is scarcely a more delightful play than the “Rivals” when it is well acted, or one that goes off more indifferently when it is not. The humour is of so broad and farcical a kind, that if not thoroughly entered into and carried off by the tone and manner of the performers, it fails of effect from its obtrusiveness, and becomes flat from eccentricity. The absurdities brought forward are of that artificial, affected, and preposterous description, that we in some measure require to have the evidence of our senses to see the persons themselves “jetting under the advance plumes of their folly,”^[52] before we can entirely believe in their existence, or derive pleasure from their exposure. If the extravagance of the poet’s conception is not supported by the downright reality of the representation, our credulity is staggered and falls to the ground.

 

‘For instance, Acres should be as odd a compound in external appearance as he is of the author’s brain. He must look like a very notable mixture of the lively coxcomb and the blundering blockhead, to reconcile us to his continued impertinence and senseless flippancy. Acres is a mere conventional character, a gay, fluttering automaton, constructed upon mechanical principles, and pushed, as it were, by the logic of wit and a strict keeping in the pursuit of the ridiculous, into follies and fopperies which his natural thoughtlessness would never have dreamt of. Acres does not say or do what such a half-witted young gentleman would say or do of his own head, but what he might be led to do or say with such a prompter as Sheridan at his elbow to tutor him in absurdity—to make a butt of him first, and laugh at him afterwards. Thus his presence of mind in persisting in his allegorical swearing, “Odds triggers and flints,”^[53] in the duel scene, when he is trembling all over with cowardice, is quite out of character, but it keeps up the preconcerted jest. In proportion, therefore, as the author has overdone the part, it calls for a greater effort of animal spirits, and a peculiar aptitude of genius in the actor to go through with it, to humour the extravagance, and to seem to take a real and cordial delight in caricaturing himself. Dodd^[54] was the only actor we remember who realised this ideal combination of volatility and phlegm, of slowness of understanding with levity of purpose, of vacancy of thought and vivacity of gesture. Acres’ affected phrases and apish manners used to sit upon this inimitable actor with the same sort of bumpkin grace and conscious self-complacency as the new cut of his clothes. In general, this character is made little of on the stage; and when left to shift for itself, seems as vapid as it is forced.

 

‘Mrs. Malaprop is another portrait of the same overcharged description. The chief drollery of this extraordinary personage consists of her unaccountable and systematic misapplication of hard words. How she should know the words, and not their meaning, is a little odd. In reading the play we are amused with such a series of ridiculous blunders, just as we are with a series of puns or cross-readings. But to keep up the farce upon the stage, besides “a nice derangement of epitaphs,”^[55] the imagination must have the assistance of a stately array of grave pretensions, and a most formidable establishment of countenance, with all the vulgar self-sufficiency of pride and ignorance, before it can give full credit to this learned tissue of technical absurdity.

 

‘As to Miss Lydia Languish, she is not easily done to the life. She is a delightful compound of extravagance and naïveté. She is fond and froward, practical and chimerical, hot and cold in a breath. She is that kind of fruit which drops into the mouth before it is ripe. She must have a husband, but she will not have one without an elopement. This young lady is at an age and of a disposition to throw herself into the arms of the first handsome young fellow she meets; but she repents and grows sullen, like a spoiled child, when she finds that nobody hinders her. She should have all the physiognomical marks of a true boarding-school, novel-reading Miss about her, and some others into the bargain. Sir Anthony’s description hardly comes up to the truth. She should have large, rolling eyes; pouting, disdainful lips; a pale, clear complexion; an oval chin, an arching neck, and a profusion of dark ringlets falling down upon it, or she will never answer to our ideas of the charming sentimental hoyden, who is the heroine of the play.

 

‘Faulkland is a refined study of a very common disagreeable character, actuated by an unceasing spirit of contradiction, who perversely seizes every idle pretext for making himself and others miserable; or querulous enthusiast, determined on disappointment, and enamoured with suspicion. He is without excuse; nor is it without some difficulty that we endure his self-tormenting follies, through our partiality for Julia, the amiable, unresisting victim of his gloomy caprice.

 

‘Sir Anthony Absolute and his son are the most sterling characters of the play. The tetchy, positive, impatient, overbearing, but warm and generous character of the one, and the gallant, determined spirit, adroit address, and dry humour of the other, are admirably set off against each other. The two scenes in which they contend about the proposed match, in the first of which the indignant lover is as choleric and rash as the old gentleman is furious and obstinate, and in the latter of which the son affects such a cool indifference and dutiful submission to his father, from having found out that it is the mistress of his choice whom he is to be compelled to marry, are masterpieces both of wit, humour, and character. Sir Anthony Absolute is an evident copy after Smollett’s kind-hearted, high-spirited Matthew Bramble, as Mrs. Malaprop is after the redoubted linguist, Mrs. Tabitha Bramble; and, indeed the whole tone, as well as the local scenery of the “Rivals,” reminds the reader of “Humphry Clinker.” Sheridan had a right to borrow; and he made use of this privilege, not sparingly, both in this and in his other plays. His Acres, as well in the general character as in particular scenes, is a mannered imitation of Sir Andrew Ague-cheek.

 

‘Fag, Lucy, and Sir Lucius O’Trigger, though subordinate agents in the plot of the “Rivals,” are not the less amusing on that account. Fag wears his master’s wit, as he does his lace, at second-hand; Lucy is an edifying specimen of simplicity in a chambermaid, and Sir Lucius is an honest fortune-hunting Hibernian, who means well to himself, and no harm to anybody else. They are also traditional characters, common to the stage; but they are drawn with all the life and spirit of originals.

 

‘This appears, indeed, to have been the peculiar forte and the great praise of our author’s genius, that he could imitate with the spirit of an inventor. There is hardly a character, we believe, or a marked situation in any of his works, of which there are not distinct traces to be found in his predecessors. But though the groundwork and texture of his materials was little more than what he found already existing in the models of acknowledged excellence, yet he constantly varied or improved upon their suggestions with masterly skill and ingenuity. He applied what he thus borrowed, with a sparkling effect and rare felicity, to different circumstances, and adapted it with peculiar elegance to the prevailing taste of the age. He was the farthest possible from a servile plagiarist. He wrote in imitation of Congreve, Vanbrugh, or Wycherley, as those persons would have written in continuation of themselves, had they lived at the same time with him. There is no excellence of former writers of which he has not availed himself, and which he has not converted to his own purposes, with equal spirit and success. He had great acuteness and knowledge of the world; and if he did not create his own characters, he compared them with their prototypes in nature, and understood their bearings and qualities, before he undertook to make a different use of them. He had wit, fancy, sentiment at command, enabling him to place the thoughts of others in new lights of his own, which reflected back an added lustre on the originals: whatever he touched, he adorned with all the ease, grace, and brilliancy of his style. If he ranks only as a man of second-rate genius, he was assuredly a man of first-rate talents. He was the most classical and the most popular dramatic writer of his age. The works he has left behind him will remain as monuments of his fame, for the delight and instruction of posterity.

 

‘Mr. Sheridan not only excelled as a comic writer, but was also an eminent orator, and a disinterested patriot. As a public speaker, he was distinguished by acuteness of observation and pointed wit, more than by impassioned eloquence, or powerful and comprehensive reasoning. Considering him with reference to his conversational talents, his merits as a comic writer, and as a political character, he was perhaps the most accomplished person of his time.

“Take him for all in all,

We shall not look upon his like again.”^[56]

165.

‘Had I a heart,’ etc. The Duenna, Act I. Sc. 5.

166.

‘Half thy malice,’ etc. Ibid. Act III. Sc. 1.

 

That on the Begum’s affairs. June 3, 6, 10, 13, 1788.

 

One who has all the ability, etc. Hazlitt refers to Thomas Moore, whose Life of Sheridan, however, did not appear till 1825.

 

Macklin’s Man of the World. Charles Macklin’s (1697?-1797) The Man of the World, first produced in London in 1781. For George Frederick Cooke’s (1756-1811) acting in the part of Sir Pertinax Macsycophant see Leigh Hunt’s Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres (1807), pp. 220-1.

 

Mr. Holcroft. See Hazlitt’s Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Holcroft, vol. II. pp. 121-4 of the present edition.

 

l. 38. In the third edition the following account of The West Indian from Oxberry’s The New English Drama (Vol. I.) is interpolated:—

 

‘As to the “West Indian,” it is a play that from the time of its first appearing has continued to hold possession of the stage, with just enough merit to keep it there, and no striking faults to drive it thence. It is above mediocrity. There is an agreeable vein of good humour and animal spirits running through it that does not suffer it to sink into downright insipidity, nor ever excites any very high degree of interest or delight. Wit there is none, and hardly an attempt at humour, except in the character of Major O’ Flaherty, who would not be recognised as a genuine Irishman but by virtue of his representative on the stage. His blunders and conduct are not such as would proceed from the good-natured unthinking impetuosity of such a person as O’ Flaherty is intended to be: but they are such as the author might sit down and try to invent for him. It is not an Irish character, but a character playing the Irishman; not a hasty, warm-hearted, hair-brained fellow, stumbling on mistakes by accident either in his words and actions, but a very complaisant gentleman, looking out for them by design, to humour the opinion which you entertain of him, and who is to make himself a national butt for the audience to laugh at. The “West Indian” himself (Belcour) is certainly the support of the piece. There is something interesting in the idea of seeing a young fellow of high animal spirits, a handsome fortune, and considerable generosity of feeling, launched from the other side of the world (with the additional impetus that the distance would give him) to run the gauntlet of the follies and vices of the town, to fall into scrapes only to get out of them, and who is full of professions of attachment to virtues which he does not practise, and of repentance for offences which he has not committed. It is the same character as Charles Surface in the “School for Scandal,” with an infusion of the romantic from his transatlantic origin, and an additional excuse for his extravagances in the tropical temperature of his blood.

 

‘The language of this play is elegant but common-place: the speakers seem in general more intent on adjusting their periods than on settling their affairs. The sentiments aspire to liberality. They are amiably mawkish, and as often as they incline to paradox, have a rapid sort of petulance about them, which excites neither our sympathy nor our esteem. The plot is a good plot. It is well laid, decently distributed through the course of five acts, and wound up at last to its final catastrophe in a single sentence.’

 

The Mayor of Garratt. Samuel Foote’s (1720-1777), produced in 1764. John O’Keeffe’s (1747-1833) The Agreeable Surprise, 1781.

167.

Mother Cole, etc. Mrs. Cole and Smirk are both in The Minor (1760). Hazlitt may have been thinking of Puff in Taste (1752).

 

The acting of Dowton, etc. See A View of the English Stage, ante, p. 317, from which this passage is taken.

 

‘‘Pigeon-livered,’ etc. Hamlet, Act II. Sc. 2.

168.

Peter Pindar. John Wolcot (1738-1819). Sir Joseph Banks and the Emperor of Morocco was published in 1788. The first of his Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians appeared in 1782, and his Ode upon Ode, or a Peep at St. James’s and Instructions to a celebrated Laureat, being a Comic Account of the Visit of the Sovereign to Whitbread’s Brewery, in 1787.

 

‘Faint picture,’ etc. Adapted from Hamlet, Act V. Sc. 1.

 

Like his own expiring taper. Hazlitt seems to refer to some verses of Wolcot’s, entitled ‘To My Candle.’ See Pindar’s Works (1816), vol. II. p. 399.