It was no mechanic limit to the possibility of visiting poetic justice that tied Wycherley's hands; his lusty scapegrace escaped censure because by a clever and successful ruse he proved himself a true hero of wit. In this The Country Wife may justly be regarded as a model play of its school: it does not penalize vice, but only the profession of virtue; folly is satirized, whether in its own dull complacent self or in its pretension to wit; but the worst of all offenders is the pretender at once to wit and successful vice, of which damnable hypocrisy Mr. Horner is the shining opposite.

Ethically considered this wit of the Restoration belongs to a brief interval of transition, and needs to be distinguished from what preceded and what followed. In one point its tone may seem to agree with that of comedy before the Rebellion, but even here the difference is more significant than the resemblance. In the earlier writers the darkness of evil is made hateful by an implied or explicit contrast with the light of a traditional ideal of virtue. The ideal may not be very certain, it may be almost lost, so that ethical judgement fades away into the licence of rollicking fun; but it is not denied as a convention, and it can be found lurking somewhere in the background, if not in full sight. Even in the comedy of a Fletcher, where the belief in virtue is already vanishing in a cloud of indifference, there

is a feeling of abundant animal life which still retains the faculty of resisting a universal corruption, and there are isolated scenes in which the loveliness of chastity is painted with exquisite tenderness. But with the gloomy failure of the Commonwealth of the saints a change comes. It was the very creed of those who were now thrown to the surface in the boiling cauldron of the age to deny the reality of those ideas of virtue and sanctity which had been the occasion of so much confusion. So Robert Gould writes his Satire Against Man, half in the sceptical tone of the reigning school, half in a spirit of alarm at the completeness of their scepticism:

Slave to his passions, ev'ry sev'ral lust

Whisks him about, as whirlwinds do the dust;
And dust he is indeed, a senseless clod,

That swells, and would be yet believed a God....

That is Gould's own notion of mankind, though he has the proper indignation against the wits who live and write accordingly:

But that we may the monster undisguise
We'll first (as in the scale of truth it lies)
Lay open what a modern wit implies:
An impious wretch that Scripture ridicules,
And thinks the men that dare not do it fools;

A lustful goat, who to be fully known

For what he is, does pick and cull the town
For maids and wives

the rest is better unquoted.

The ethos of the Restoration wits was, as a whole and with due reservations, not so much a licence of high spirits as a complacent cynicism. Out of this cynicism the drama of sensibility, preluding the rise of a whole new literature, came as a natural reaction, but it introduced an error as vicious in its consequences as that against which it revolted. At least the cynicism of disillusion was free of the lying spirit of flattery, the cowardly fear of facts, which has spread like a mouldy disease through so much of modern writing. "In this book," said Dr. Johnson of Lord Kames's Sketches of the History of Man, laying his finger as usual on the quick of the matter, "it is maintained that virtue is natural to man, and that if we would but consult our own hearts, we should be virtuous. Now, after consulting our own hearts all we can, and with all the helps we have, we find how few of us are virtuous. This is saying a thing which all mankind know not to be true." Far nearer the truth was the development of the wit of complacent cynicism into the wit of satire, as we see it in Swift and Pope. I would not place the êthos of this new satire too high; it retained too much of the Restoration one-sidedness, and restored too little of the more balanced view of human nature which was lost lost for how long a time? But the indignation of a Swift was altogether a sounder passion than the trifling mockery of a Rochester, and the law of hatred that

governed the little band of Tories who fell with Bolingbroke, indiscriminate though it may seem, was a tonic restorative after the kind of laughter that succeeded in the court of Charles the Second.

In regard to the literary value of the comedy in which Mrs. Behn made her name critics will differ according to the degree of importance they attach to ethical tone as a factor of interest and according to the measure of their resistance to the deadening effects of monotony. For my part a few of these plays - notably two or three of Congreve's and Wycherley's never fail to intrigue me by their audacity and by their extraordinary resourcefulness within a narrowly circumscribed field; but in general the conventions of the genre are so apparent and so tyrannical that my attention soon flags and I find myself yawning. The Roman emperor discovered long ago the monotony of mere vice, but vice grows really pitiful when it has no more variety than it seems to have offered to these hard-worked panders of the stage. One often wishes they had taken to heart the advice of Rochester:

Farewell, woman, I intend

Henceforth every night to sit

With my lewd well-natured friend,
Drinking to engender wit.

I suspect the conversion of Rochester in the end was due less to the pious ministrations of

Dr. Burnet than to the memory of the frightful ennui that had pursued him and his kind in their heartless search for diversion. "The hand of God touched him; ... it was not only a general dark melancholy over his mind, such as he had formerly felt, but a most penetrating cuttng sorrow."

Such is the field in which our female comedian bravely raised a lance amid the masculine champions of the day, and if she did not prove herself quite the equal of her greater adversaries, she at least won no dishonourable place in the lists. Occasionally she shows the working of another spirit, as if a breath from an earlier world blew across the stage. There is, for example, a scene in A Night's Intrigue (IV, i) which is almost poetry and deserves a moment's special attention. Briefly the situation is this: Fillamour is in love with Marcella, who, being contracted to another man, has escaped to Rome disguised as a courtesan. Fillamour, with his less scrupulous friend Galliard, is discovered in her chamber, and we have a pretty play of cross-purposes, the lady making trial of his constancy under the protection of her disguise, and Fillamour being troubled by her resemblance to her real self:

Fil. Hah! the fair enchantress.

[Enter Mar. richly and loosely dressed. Mar. What, on your guard, my lovely cavalier? Lies

there a danger