more acceptable to the "reformed" court
of Louis XIV. Addison, in allowing his _Cato_ to take its chance upon
the stage, when a moment of political excitement (April 1713) ensured to
it an extraordinary success, to which no feature in it corresponds,
except an unusual number of lines predestined to become familiar
quotations, unconsciously sealed the doom of English national tragedy.
The "first reasonable English tragedy," as Voltaire called it, had been
produced, and the oscillations of the tragic drama of the Restoration
were at an end.

Comedy.

English comedy in this period displayed no similar desire to cut itself
off from the native soil, though it freely borrowed the materials for
its plots and many of its figures from Spanish, and afterwards more
generally from French, originals. The spirit of the old romantic comedy
had long since fled; the graceful artificialities of the pastoral drama,
even the light texture of the mask, ill suited the demands of an age
which made no secret to itself of the grossness of its sensuality. With
a few unimportant exceptions, such poetic elements as admitted of being
combined with the poetic drama were absorbed by the opera and the
ballet. No new species of the comic drama formed itself, though towards
the close of the period may be noticed the beginnings of modern English
farce. Political and religious partisanship, generally in accordance
with the dominant reaction against Puritanism, were allowed to find
expression in the directest and coarsest forms upon the stage, and to
hasten the necessity for a more systematic control than even the times
before the Revolution had found requisite. At the same time the
unblushing indecency which the Restoration had spread through court and
capital had established its dominion over the comic stage, corrupting
the manners, and with them the morals, of its dramatists, and forbidding
them, at the risk of seeming dull, to be anything but improper. Much of
this found its way even into the epilogues, which, together with the
prologues, proved so important an adjunct of the Restoration drama.
These influences determine the general character of what is with a more
than chronological meaning termed the comedy of the Restoration. In
construction, the national love of fulness and solidity of dramatic
treatment induced its authors to alter what they borrowed from foreign
sources, adding to complicated Spanish plots characters of native
English direc