urtain to rise again on the
performers. In those old days female modesty was protected by a fan,
behind which, and it was of a convenient semicircular breadth, the ladies
present in the theatre retired at a signal of decorum, to peep, covertly
askant, or with the option of so peeping, through a prettily fringed
eyelet-hole in the eclipsing arch.

'Ego limis specto sic per flabellum clanculum.'--

TERENCE.

That fan is the flag and symbol of the society giving us our so-called
Comedy of Manners, or Comedy of the manners of South-sea Islanders under
city veneer; and as to Comic idea, vacuous as the mask without the face
behind it.

Elia, whose humour delighted in floating a galleon paradox and wafting it
as far as it would go, bewails the extinction of our artificial Comedy,
like a poet sighing over the vanished splendour of Cleopatra's
Nile-barge; and the sedateness of his plea for a cause condemned even in
his time to the penitentiary, is a novel effect of the ludicrous. When
the realism of those 'fictitious half-believed personages,' as he calls
them, had ceased to strike, they were objectionable company, uncaressable
as puppets. Their artifices are staringly naked, and have now the effect
of a painted face viewed, after warm hours of dancing, in the morning
light. How could the Lurewells and the Plyants ever have been praised
for ingenuity in wickedness? Critics, apparently sober, and of high
reputation, held up their shallow knaveries for the world to admire.
These Lurewells, Plyants, Pinchwifes, Fondlewifes, Miss Prue, Peggy,
Hoyden, all of them save charming Milamant, are dead as last year's
clothes in a fashionable fine lady's wardrobe, and it must be an
exceptionably abandoned Abigail of our period that would look on them
with the wish to appear in their likeness. Whether the puppet show of
Punch and Judy inspires our street-urchins to have instant recourse to
their fists in a dispute, after the fashion of every one of the actors in
that public entertainment who gets possession of the cudgel, is open to
question: it has been hinted; and angry moralists have traced the
national taste for tales of crime to the smell of blood in our nursery-
songs. It will at any rate hardly be questioned that it is unwholesome
for men and women to see themselves as they are, if they are no better
than they should be: and they will not, when they have improved in
manners, care much to see themselves as they once wer