, adore this soft descending goodness!' or a man conversing in
the following strain with a wife who has discovered and forgiven his
infidelities:

'_Sir Charles._ Come, I will not shock your softness by any
untimely blush for what is past, but rather soothe you to a
pleasure at my sense of joy for my recovered happiness to come.
Give then to my new-born love what name you please, it cannot,
shall not be too kind. Oh! it cannot be too soft for what my
soul swells up with emulation to deserve. Receive me then entire
at last, and take what yet no woman ever truly had, my conquered
heart.

'_Lady Easy._ Oh, the soft treasure! Oh, the dear reward of
long-desiring love--thus, thus to have you mine is something
more than happiness, 'tis double life and madness of abounding
joy....

'_Sir Charles._ Oh, thou engaging virtue! But I'm too slow in
doing justice to thy love. I know thy softness will refuse me;
but remember, I insist upon it--let thy woman be discharged this
minute.'

It has been said that Cibber wrote genteel comedy because he lived in
the best society. If this assertion be true, the reader of his plays
will decide that the best society of those days was unrefined and
immoral, and that genteel comedy can be extremely vulgar. Cibber's
dramas are coarse in incident, and often offensive in suggestion. The
language is frequently gross, and even when he writes, or professes to
write, with a moral purpose, his method may justly offend a rigid
moralist. Moreover his comedy, like that of the dramatists of the
Restoration, is of a wholly artificial type. Human nature has
comparatively little place in it, and the fine ladies and gentlemen, the
fops and fools who play their parts in his scenes, belong to a world
which has no existence off the boards of the theatre.

His one work which is still read by all students of the drama, and by
many who are not students, is the _Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley
Cibber_ (1740), which Dr. Johnson, who sneered at actors, allowed to be
very entertaining. It is that, and something more, for it contains much
just and generous criticism. Cibber was the author or adapter of about
thirty plays, and in the latter vocation did not spare Shakespeare.

[Sidenote: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762).]

Letter writing, a delightful branch of literature, attained its highest
excellence in the eighteenth century. It is an art w