that Farquhar wrote half his comedies, beginning with his first, with its gay, officer-like title of "Love and a Bottle."

The author opens this piece in a way which, in all probability, was characteristic of his condition at the time, as well as of the good-natured sort of genius which the world was to expect of him. His hero enters, full of poverty and animal spirits, with a dramatic quotation in his mouth, an intimation of his wish to turn soldier, and evidence of a tolerating disposition in the midst of his

sarcasm.

"Act I., Scene-Lincoln's Inn Fields.

"Enter ROEBUCK, in a riding-habit, solus (repeating the following line).

'Thus far our arms have with success been crown'd.'

Heroically spoken, i'faith, of a fellow that has not one farthing in his pocket. If I have one penny to buy a halter withal, in my present necessity, may I be hanged :—though I am reduced to a fair way of obtaining one methodically very soon, if robbery or theft will purchase the gallows. But hold-can't I rob honourably by turning soldier?

"Enter a Cripple, begging.

"Crip. One farthing to the poor old soldier, for the Lord's sake!

"Roe. Ha! A glimpse of damnation, just as a man is entering into sin, is no great policy of the devil.But how long did you bear arms, friend?

'Crip. Fifteen, sir.

"Roe. Very pretty! Five years a soldier, and fifteen a beggar! This is hell, right! an age of damnation for a momentary offence! Thy condition, fellow, is preferable to mine. The merciful bullet, more kind than thy ungrateful country, has given thee a debenture 'n thy broken leg, from which thou canst draw a more plentiful maintenance, than I from all my limbs ir perfection. Prithee, friend, why wouldst thou beg of me? Dost think I am rich?

"Crip. No, sir; and therefore I believe you charitable. Your warm fellows are so much above the sense of our misery, that they can't pity us."

"Love and a Bottle," which came out at Drury Lane, in the year 1698, was well received. It has been thought strange, that the author's friend, Wilks, had no part in it; but arrangements of this kind often depend upon circumstances with which friendship, and the wishes of the parties, have nothing to do. We shall give a reason, however, by and by, why we take Wilks, with all his gaiety, to have been a very worldly, prudent man; and he might not have chosen to risk himself in a part untried. It is one thing to have a good opinion of a man's general abilities, and even to encourage him to adventure them in a particular direction (as Wilks is said to have done), and another to commit the adviser's fortunes with the experiments of the poor advisee. Wilks was glad enough, at all events, to appear in the next play of the now successful dramatist.

Success, wit, and his cheerful good-nature, speedily obtained for Farquhar an influence upon the town; and we find, next year, a pleasant instance of it upon the future fortunes of the celebrated Mrs. Oldfield. She was then sixteen, and niece of a Mrs. Voss, who kept the Mitre Tavern in St. James's Market. The story tells us, that Captain Farquhar, dining there one day, "heard Miss Nanny read a play behind the bar, with so proper an emphasis and such agreeable turns, suitable to each character, that he swore the girl was cut out for the stage, to which she had before expressed an inclination, being very desirous to try her fortune that way. Her mother, (continues the narrator, a quondam servant of Rich's the manager,) the next time she saw Captain Vanbrugh, who had a great respect for the family, told him what was Captain Farquhar's advice; upon which he desired to know, whether, in the plays she read, her fancy was most pleased with tragedy or comedy. Miss, being called in, said comedy; she having, at that time, gone through all Beaumont and Fletcher's comedies; and the play she was reading, when Captain Farquhar dined there, was the 'Scornful Lady.' Captain Vanbrugh, shortly after, recommended her to Mr. Christopher Rich,

who took her into the house, at the allowance of but fifteen shillings per week. However, her agreeable figure, and the sweetness of her voice, soon gave her the preference, in the opinion of the whole town, to all the young actresses; and his grace the late Duke of Bedford being pleased to speak to Mr. Rich in her favour, he instantly raised her allowance to twenty shillings per week. Her fame and salary at length rose to their just merit."* We have made this extract, not only for the pleasant picture it furnishes of the young and afterwards famous beauty, first interesting Farquhar with reading "behind the bar," and then being "called in," and introduced to Vanbrugh, but out of repect to the memory of a generous woman, admirable in her day for her comic genius, and honourable with posterity as the patroness of Savage. It has been supposed that a tenderer reason grew in Farquhar's mind for the interest he took in the young actress; and that she is the Penelope of the letters which he has left us. She, at all events, retained a pleasant recollection of him. "I have often heard Mrs. Oldfield mention the many agreeable hours she had spent in Mr. Farquhar's company," says an authority referred to in her "Memoirs." This is a privilege of the amiable, whatever circumstances may have conspired to part them.

The ensuing year, 1700, produced at the same theatre, the "Constant Couple."—And hereby hangs a little bit of a tale of discovery, which, in default of having anything newer to relate about Farquhar, will not be uninteresting to our brother Columbuses of the book-shops. In one of the thick and abundant catalogues, which Mr. Thorpe, the bookseller, so magnificently gives away, we lately met with the little volume entitled "Adventures of Covent Garden," to which Farquhar is said to have been indebted for some of the incidents in this play, and which had a note appended to it in the catalogue to that effect. Upon looking into it, we found in the fly-leaf the original of this ote in the shape of a manuscript remark, under the signature of "Isaac Reed," to whom the book appears to have belonged; and upon consulting the article "Constant Couple" in one of the editions of the Biographia Dramatica, which had the benefit of the co-operation of Mr. Reed, the following observations made their appearance, being probably the above manuscript remark drawn out into due length :

"The early writers of the English drama appear to have made free, without scruple, with any materials for their dramas which fell in their way. The present is a remarkable instance. In the preceding year, 1699, was published a small volume, entitled 'The Adventures of Covent Garden, in Imitation of Scarron's City Romance,' 12mo, a piece without the slightest degree of merit; yet from thence our author (Farquhar) took the characters of Lady Lurewell and Colonel Standard, and the incidents of Beau Clincher and Tom Errand's change of clothes, with other circumstances. The character of Sir Harry Wildair, however, still remains the property of the author, and he is entitled to the credit of the general conduct of the piece. Perhaps his only fault may have been in not acknowledging the writer, contemptible as he is, to whom he was obliged."

Now on reading this book "without the slightest degree of merit," it is clear enough that the author, "contemptible as he is," was Farquhar himself. The "character" of Lady Lurewell, properly speaking, is not in the book, though some of her conduct is; neither is the production by any means "without the slightest degree of merit," for it possesses some good, hearty, criticism, in vindication of genius against rules; and what marks the production as Farquhar's, is not only this criticism (which he afterwards enlarged upon in his "Discourse upon Comedy "), and his mention of the author as " a young gentleman somewhat addicted to poetry and the diversions of the stage," to say nothing of his use of the "change of clothes," &c., but in this little prose work the poem

*From" Memoirs of Mrs. Anne Oldfield," quoted in the Biographia Britannica, art. FARQUHAR.

The

The whole title of the volume, which consists but of 58 pages in large type and small duodecimo,. Adventures of Covent Garden, in Imitation of Scarron's City Romance. Et quorum pars magna fui. London, printed by H. Hills, for R. Standfast, next door to the Three Tuns Tavern, just within Temple Bar. 1699." Somebody, in the copy before us, has turned 1609 into 1698, with a pen; and the date of "15th December" is added in the handwriting of the time, probably by the same person. By the motto Et quorum pars, &c., it appears that Farquhar had a personal and principal share in the "Adventures." The dedication is a whimsical blank, addressed to the author's acquaintance at Will's coffee-house; and at the close of the address to the reader, he says that nobody knows who the author is but his heroine Emilia, whom he threatens with discovery in turn, if disclosed by her.

first appears, which, with the addition of six lines, he afterwards published in his Miscellanies under the title of the "Lover's Night." In the "Adventures of Covent Garden" it consists of fifty-two lines; in the "Miscellanies," of fifty-eight. We "hope," as Shakspeare says, "here be proofs." We are far from wishing to undervalue the industry of Isaac Reed, or the utility of his researches; and mistakes are common to everybody: but we here see what was the amount of his criticism, when taken unawares. Scorn, which is perilous to the pretensions of the greatest men, is ruinous to those of the less.

It is curious enough, and perhaps was not without design, that the “Lurewell" of the "Constant Couple" and its sequel, whose early history in one respect resembles that of the famous Mrs. Manly, author of the "New Atalantis," is said in the play to have been the daughter of a "Sir Roger Manly." Mrs. Manly herself, who was making a noise at the time the play was written, was the daughter of a Sir Oliver Manly. She was a Tory, and very hostile to the Revolution, and Farquhar was a friend to it; but she was also a wit, a play-wright, and a woman of gallantry; Farquhar may have become acquainted with her in those characters; and from the result of a mixture of feelings, better guessed than described, might thus have been ultimately led to take a liberty with her name, hardly compatible with his own gallantry and good-nature; unless we are to suppose that he regarded a woman of her scandal-loving and uncompromising partisanship, as putting herself out of the pale of her sex. She herself libelled freely her own quondam admirers, Sir Richard Steele among them.

In the May of this year (1700), our author, whether by accident or design,-most likely the latter, as everybody" seems to have been there, and a dramatist would probably go as a mourner, -was present at the much-discussed funeral of Dryden, of which he has given what Sir Walter Scott calls a "ludicrous account." The account (which the reader will see at the close of the life) is certainly written under an impression of the ludicrous; but whatever exaggerations of the business may have been created by such reporters as impudent Tom Brown, and poor gossiping Mrs. Thomas, we cannot but think that the ceremony must have been mixed up with a good deal that was strange and ill-managed, and that precaution had not been taken to give the procession its proper gravity, or guard against the attendance of disrespected and disrespectful persons. Dryden passed his whole life between homage and abuse, between the high life in which he was born, and the shifts to which narrow circumstances reduced him; and agreeably to this sort of existence, his very corpse seems to have been scrambled into its grave, betwixt anxiety and irreverence.

In the summer and autumn of the same year, we find our author in Holland, probably with his regiment, awaiting the anti-gallican movements of King William, which, however, came to little or nothing that season; nor does it appear that Farquhar ever saw any very hot service, whatever proofs he may have given of his aptitude for it. In his sympathy with those around him, and his zeal for the security of the Revolution, he persuaded himself that a knowledge of the Dutch language was necessary to the interests of his countrymen; and lamented, that young gentlemen preferred going to France instead of Holland, in order to see the world; opinions that sound oddly enough from the lips of the lively Farquhar. But, like all wits of a high order, he had gravity as well as levity in his composition, and was easily attracted towards whatever he thought of importance to his fellow-creatures. In October, William returned to the Hague, where Farquhar then was, from one of his visits to his retreat at Loo; and the young dramatist and officer, destined to be one of the honours of his reign, and share a duration with posterity of which the phlegmatic sovereign little dreamt, appears to have come back to England in his train.

The next year saw a continuation of the "Constant Couple," in a new play entitled "Sir Harry Wildair," in which both Wilks and Mrs. Oldfield performed to admiration; but, like all sequels, its merits lay chiefly in associations with its precursor. A very small part, however, that of a servant, happening to fall into the hands of Norris, a man of quaint original humour, it fitted him so happily as to bring him into celebrity, and got its very name affixed to him in the bills of other plays. The same man, however, was, on a future occasion, designated "Heigh-ho Norris," in a playbill, simply because he uttered a couple of lines, containing that exclamation, in a style of exquisite

*

drollery. So that it was the actor's humour, quite as much as the author's, that helped the "Sequel" to this odd bit of lustre.

In 1702 appeared the "Miscellanies," a small collection of letters, poems, and essays, originally called, we believe, “Love and Business,”—(for we have only seen it in the collected works). It has little merit, with the exception of an Essay on Comedy," and was probably got together under some pressure of pecuniary trouble. Mrs. Oldfield is conjectured to have returned some letters, in order to contribute to it; and she is said to have taken great pleasure afterwards in perusing both them and the essay. Such passages as it contains, not unworthy of the writer, we have selected at the close of this memoir. One of the best pieces is a portrait of himself, painted with evidences of much candour and modesty, and yet to his advantage; and we doubt not it was a true one. A man is not obliged to tell falsehoods of himself, in order to obtain a reputation for the very sincerity which such a process must undo. It is enough if, being upon the whole an honest man, he is neither blind to his faults nor sets too great a store by his virtues; and it is interesting to think how many of these portraits (the fashion for which originated, we believe, in the social egotism of our pleasant neighbours across the Channel) contain manifest proofs of the ame candid moderation as Farquhar's. But animal spirits are too often confounded with an overweening self-estimation. People are more often aware of their own defects, than the world give them credit for being. Only in the ignorant it exhibits itself in a jealous irritability. Wiser men alone know how to reconcile the uneasiness of one part of self-knowledge, with the humanities that help to make up for it in the other.

The "Inconstant," or "The Way to win him," founded on Fletcher's "Wild Goose Chase," appeared in 1703, but not with as much success as might be supposed from its having kept possession of the stage. It was hurt by the reigning fashion for dancers from the Continent; and the critics appear to have been greatly divided about its merits; why, it is no longer very clear. The lovers of the old poetic play resented perhaps the author's free and easy way of almost appropriating it to himself in his prose version.

As this is about the time that Farquhar married, we are led to glance round upon his previous life, and to wish to know more of it. Little, however, can be collected, and his letters want dates for what there can. One is sent from the Inner Temple, and some are written from Gray's Inn; probably from coffee-houses; though anybody may live in an inn of Court. When he was in Holland, he visited the Brill, Leyden, Rotterdam, and the Hague. On his return we find him at one time in Essex, hare-hunting (not in the style of a proficient); at another at Richmond, sick; and at a third, in Shropshire, on a recruiting party, where he was treated with great hospitality, and found the materials for one of the best of his plays. When he was in Holland he appears to have rescued a lady from some villanous design upon her. She was the same with whom he afterwards condoles in one of the letters, upon a suspicious robbery which she said she had undergone. Probably it was the woman he married.

At what exact time this marriage took place, whether it was before or after the production of the "Inconstant," we cannot say; but the event itself was almost as dramatic as any in his writings; though, unfortunately, more tragic in its results. A lady had fallen in love with him, and knew of no better way to recommend herself as his wife than by pretending to be in possession of a fortune. The grateful and gallant dramatist took the wife without being so unpolite as to secure the fortune; and though the lady confessed to him that her love had played him a trick,—or rather perhaps, out of a secret and not unamiable vanity of comfort in the very confession,-Farquhar not only forgave ber, but never breathed to her a syllable of reproach. We shall see too well, before long, how deeply this truly gentlemanly forbearance redounded to his honour.

Our author's dramatic productions now keep a remarkable regularity of pace with the dates of the years. The" Inconstant" came out, as we have seen, in 1703. 1704 produced the "Stage-Coach;" a poor copy from the French, written in conjunction with Motteux,-probably on his first awakening from the dream of the lucky marriage. The "Twin Rivals" followed in 1705; the “ Recruiting

*Davies's Dramatic Miscellanies, vol iii. p. 310.

Officer," a great advance upon his previous dramas, in the year following; and the "Beaux Stratagem," his last and best, in 1707. These dates, to be sure, do not correspond throughout with those assigned by the latest authorities to their respective appearances in print; and in truth it would be difficult, even had we the printed copies before us, to decide upon such matters, unless we possessed thorough information respecting the dates both of representation and publication; which, perhaps, if desirable, would be impossible, especially considering the confusion created by the unsettled calendar of those days, and the tricks played with it by the booksellers. Be this as it may,

it is likely enough that Farquhar would produce a play a year, and with an eye to the payment of annual debts. The wonder indeed is, that he did not write oftener, considering his wit and poverty; but he had also the duties of his regiment to attend to, and his health was not good. It is thought to have declined with the discovery of the deception that had been put upon him, or perhaps we should rather say, with the increase of the anxions tenderness which it caused in him towards a growing family.

This anxiety unfortunately subjected him to another deception, which is thought to have occasioned his death. Some patron, filling him with hopes of another kind of preferment, which he represented as certain, tempted him to sell out of the army. The poor dramatist, when the proceeds were spent, found the patron without truth, and himself without a prospect or a penny. He took to his sick chair; retained enough of the blissful abstraction of genius to write the " Beaux Stratagem" in six weeks; and died during the height of its success, before he had attained his thirtieth year. He is supposed to have been buried in the churchyard of St. Martin's-in-the-Field's. A dying anecdote, full of his usual good-temper and pleasantry, shows that he had foreseen his exit. Wilks, during the rehearsal of the play, observing to him that Mrs. Oldfield wished he could have thought of some more legitimate divorce in order to secure the "honour" of Mrs. Sullen, “Oh," said Farquhar, "I will, if she pleases, solve that immediately, by getting a real divorce, marrying her myself, and giving her my bond that she shall be a widow in less than a fortnight."-Poor, nature-loving, cheerful, melancholy Farquhar! And so, turning away perhaps with the tears in his eyes at the thought of his real wife and his children, he perished.

Well, being the man he was, and giving a great deal of pleasure to his fellow-creatures, he must upon the whole have had a far happier life of it, than a melancholy. Yet a great sorrow remains to be told. We hardly know whether pleasure or grief predominates, when we read his dying thanks to Wilks in his short preface, reminding us of the more exquisite words on the like occasion, addressed to the Conde de Lemos, by the great Cervantes, and prefixed to his romance of "Persiles and Sigismunda;" but what are we to think were his feelings, when he wrote the following death-bed letter to Wilks :

"DEAR BOB,

"I have not anything to leave thee, to perpetuate my memory, but two helpless girls. Look upon them sometimes, and think of him that was, to the last moment of his life, thine. "GEORGE FARQUHAR."

This simple brevity, and even the gay familiarity of the address, has something in it affecting beyond the ordinary, and, in some measure, self-repaying solemnity of tragical expressions. And our sorrow is heightened, when we hear one of his biographers telling us, that he had often heard Farquhar say he would rather undergo the most violent death than think of his family wanting needful support.

"But it served him right,"-some luckier formalist may exclaim, more comfortable in the vanity of the opinion than in the real feeling of it (for man's heart is generally juster to itself at bottom, as you may know by the uneasy tone in which such opinions are expressed), "He should not have led such a careless life, nor trusted so foolishly to a patron."-Nay, judge him not, thou poor happier, unhappier man; his larger and livelier sympathies with his fellow-creatures produced works that delight them still, and that blinded him to the probability of his own early fate, till the truth came in agony upon him. Kind Nature makes out her case somehow. He was careless and unlucky, and