Even in Garrick's days, when men were not much more refined than in
those of Queen Anne, it was found impossible to put the old drama on the
stage without considerable weeding. Indeed I doubt if even the liberal
upholder of Paul de Kock would call Congreve a moral writer; but I
confess I am not a competent judge, for _risum teneatis_, my critics, I
have not read his works since I was a boy, and what is more, I have no
intention of reading them. I well remember getting into my hands a large
thick volume, adorned with miserable woodcuts, and bearing on its back
the title 'Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar.' I devoured it
at first with the same avidity with which one might welcome a
bottle-imp, who at the hour of one's dulness turned up out of the carpet
and offered you delights new and old for nothing but a tether on your
soul: and with a like horror, boy though I was, I recoiled from it when
any better moment came. It seemed to me, when I read this book, as if
life were too rotten for any belief, a nest of sharpers, adulterers,
cut-throats, and prostitutes. There was none--as far as I remember--of
that amiable weakness, of that better sentiment, which in Ben Jonson or
Massinger reconcile us to human nature.
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