e of Charles II., at Antwerp, and one of the
coarsest of the Restoration comedians. The profession of piety had
become so disagreeable that a shameless cynicism was now considered the
mark of a gentleman. The ideal hero of Wycherley or Etherege was the
witty young profligate, who had seen life, and learned to disbelieve in
virtue. His highest qualities were a contempt for cant, physical
courage, a sort of spendthrift generosity, and a good-natured readiness
to back up a friend in a quarrel, or an amour. Virtue was
_bourgeois_--reserved for London trades-people. A man must be either a
rake or a hypocrite. The gentlemen were rakes, the city people were
hypocrites. Their wives, however, were all in love with the gentlemen,
and it was the proper thing to seduce them, and to borrow their
husbands' money. For the first and last time, perhaps, in the history
of the English drama, the sympathy of the audience was deliberately
sought for the seducer and the rogue, and the laugh {171} turned
against the dishonored husband and the honest man. (Contrast this with
Shakspere's _Merry Wives of Windsor_.) The women were represented as
worse than the men--scheming, ignorant, and corrupt. The dialogue in
the best of these plays was easy, lively, and witty; the situations in
some of them audacious almost beyond belief. Under a thin varnish of
good breeding, the sentiments and manners were really brutal. The
loosest gallants of Beaumont and Fletcher's theater retain a fineness
of feeling and that _politesse de coeur_--which marks the gentleman.
They are poetic creatures, and own a capacity for romantic passion.
But the Manlys and Homers of the Restoration comedy have a prosaic,
cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts. Charles Lamb, in his ingenious
essay on "The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century," apologized for
the Restoration stage, on the ground that it represented a world of
whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws of morality had no
application.

But Macaulay answered truly, that at no time has the stage been closer
in its imitation of real life. The theater of Wycherley and Etherege
was but the counterpart of that social condition which we read of in
Pepys's _Diary_, and in the _Memoirs_ of the Chevalier de Grammont.
This prose comedy of manners was not, indeed, "artificial" at all, in
the sense in which the contemporary tragedy--the "heroic play"--was
artificial. It was, on the contrary, far more natural, and,