at thinkest thou of his opinion?
_Mal_. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion.]

[Footnote 2: Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his death a choice
collection of old English literature. I should judge him to have been
a man of wit. I know one instance of an impromptu which no length of
study could have bettered. My merry friend, Jem White, had seen him
one evening in Aguecheek, and recognising Dodd the next day in Fleet
Street, was irresistibly impelled to take off his hat and salute him
as the identical Knight of the preceding evening with a "Save you,
_Sir Andrew_." Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this unusual address
from a stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking wave of the hand, put
him off with an "Away, _Fool_."]

[Footnote 3: High Life Below Stairs.]

ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY

The artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our
stage. Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years
only, to be exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear
them. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occasional license of
dialogue? I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic
characters will not stand the moral test. We screw every thing up to
that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of
an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications
of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent
or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests
left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours'
duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which
inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. We are
spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to the point
of strict morality) and take it all for truth. We substitute a real
for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. We try him in our
courts, from which there is no appeal to the _dramatis personae_, his
peers. We have been spoiled with--not sentimental comedy--but a tyrant
far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the
exclusive and all devouring drama of common life; where the moral
point is every thing; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed
personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy) we recognise
ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons,
enemies,--the same as in life,--with an interest in what is going