At the same time I make the town no ill
compliment for their kind acceptance of this comedy, in acknowledging
that it has so far raised my opinion of it, as to make me think it no
improper memorial of an inviolable Friendship. I should not offer it
to you as such, had I not been very careful to avoid everything that
might look ill-natured, immoral, or prejudicial to what the better
part of mankind hold sacred and honourable.'

This was the common ground between the friends. Collier's 'Short View of
the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage' had been published
in 1698; it attacked a real evil, if not always in the right way, and
Congreve's reply to it had been a failure. Steele's comedies with all
their gaiety and humour were wholly free from the garnish of oaths and
unwholesome expletives which his contemporaries seemed to think
essential to stage emphasis. Each comedy of his was based on
seriousness, as all sound English wit has been since there have been
writers in England. The gay manner did not conceal all the earnest
thoughts that might jar with the humour of the town; and thus Steele was
able to claim, by right of his third play, 'the honour of being the only
English dramatist who had had a piece damned for its piety.'

This was the 'Lying Lover', produced in 1704, an adaptation from
Corneille in which we must allow that Steele's earnestness in upholding
truth and right did cause him to spoil the comedy. The play was
afterwards re-adapted by Foote as the 'Liar', and in its last form, with
another change or two, has been revived at times with great success. It
is worth while to note how Steele dealt with the story of this piece.
Its original is a play by Alarcon, which Corneille at first supposed to
have been a play by Lope de Vega. Alarcon, or, to give him his full
style, Don Juan Ruiz de Alarcon y Mendoza, was a Mexican-born Spaniard
of a noble family which had distinguished itself in Mexico from the time
of the conquest, and took its name of Alarcon from a village in New
Castile. The poet was a humpbacked dwarf, a thorough, but rather
haughty, Spanish gentleman, poet and wit, who wrote in an unusually pure
Spanish style; a man of the world, too, who came to Spain in or about
the year 1622, and held the very well-paid office of reporter to the
Royal Council of the Indies. When Alarcon, in 1634, was chosen by the
Court to write a festival drama, and, at the same time, publishing the
second