ectious and penetrating. In that quality he was
original and affluent. As we look along the line of the British
dramatists for the last hundred years we shall find no parallel to his
felicity in the use of comic inversion and equivoke, till we come to
Gilbert. Though he was tedious while he deferred to that theatrical
sentimentality which was the fashion of his day (and against which
Goldsmith, in _She Stoops to Conquer_, was the first to strike), he
could sometimes escape from it; and when he did escape he was brilliant.
In _The Heir at Law_ he has not only illumined it by the contrast of Dr.
Pangloss but by the unctuous humour and irresistible comic force of the
character of Daniel Dowlas, Lord Duberly. Situations in a play, in order
to be invested with the enduring quality of humour, must result from
such conduct as is the natural and spontaneous expression of comic
character. The idea of the comic parvenue is ancient. It did not
originate with Colman. His application of it, however, was novel and his
treatment of it--taking fast hold of the elemental springs of mirth--is
as fresh to-day as it was a hundred years ago. French minds, indeed, and
such as subscribe to French notions, would object that the means
employed to elicit character and awaken mirth are not scientifically and
photographically correct, and that they are violent. Circumstances, they
would say, do not so fall out that a tallow-chandler is made a lord. The
Christopher Sly expedient, they would add, is a forced expedient.
Perhaps it is. But English art sees with the eyes of the imagination and
in dramatic matters it likes to use colour and emphasis. Daniel Dowlas,
as Lord Duberly, is all the droller for being a retired tallow-chandler,
ignorant, greasy, conventional, blunt, a sturdy, honest, ridiculous
person, who thinks he has observed how lords act and who intends to put
his gained knowledge into practical use. We shall never again see him
acted as he was acted by Burton, or by that fine actor William Rufus
Blake, or even by John Gilbert--who was of rather too choleric a
temperament and too fine a texture for such an oily and stupidly
complacent personage. But whenever and however he is acted he will be
recognised as an elemental type of absurd human nature made ludicrous by
comic circumstances; and he will give rich and deep amusement.

It is to be observed, in the analysis of this comedy, that according to
Colman's intention the essential persons in