One word may be said here for Sir Ludovick Carlell, the old gentleman of the bows to Charles I. Like Shirley, Killigrew, and Davenant, he had written plays before the time of the Commonwealth; and he survived to write more after the Restoration. The only one, however, which he offered to the players was a translation of "Heraclius," by Corneille; and that was returned on his hands. There is another knight, Sir Francis Fane, from whose comedy of "Love in the Dark," Mrs. Centlivre, more clever at appropriation than Mrs. Inchbald, has taken Intrigo, the man of business, and turned him into Marplot, with considerable improvements; but as Fane himself borrowed every incident, and did not trouble himself about his language, his merit is only of the smallest order. He wrote a fair masque, and in his unrepresented "Sacrifice" was little courtier enough to make his Tamerlane declare that "princes, for the most part, keep the worst company." He and Sir Robert Howard, both Tories, could, when it pleased them, tell the truth, like the plainest spoken Whig.
More successful than Sir Francis was rollicking Tom Porter, or Major Porter, according to his military rank. Both were luckless gentlemen; but Tom wrote one play, the "Villain," which put the town in a flame, and raised Sandford's fame, as an actor, to its very highest. Tom was also the author of a rattling comedy, called the "Carnival," but rioting, and bad company and hot temper marred him. He and Sir Henry Bellasys, dining at Sir Robert Carr's, fell into fierce dispute, out of mutual error; fierce words, then a thoughtless blow from Sir Henry, then swords crossing, and tipsy people parting the combatants. They were really warm friends; but Tom had been struck, and honour forbade that he should be reconciled till blood had flown. So Dryden's boy was employed to track Bellasys, and the Major came upon him in Covent Garden, where they fought, surrounded by a crowd of admirers. Tom's honour was satisfied by passing his sword through the body of his dearest friend. The knight felt the wound was mortal, but he beckoned the less grievously wounded major to him, kissed him, and remained standing, that Tom might not be obstructed in his flight. The friend and poet safe, the knight fell back, and soon after died. There was really noble stuff in some of these dissolute fine gentlemen! But there are no two of them who have so faithfully illustrated themselves, and the times in which they lived, as Sir George Etherege and Sir Charles Sedley; the former, a knight by purchase, in order to please a silly woman, who vowed she would many none but a man of title; the latter, a baronet by inheritance. Sir George, born in 1636, was the descendant of a good—Sir Charles, born three years later, a member of a better—family, reckoning among its sons scholars and patrons of scholars. Sir George left Cambridge undistinguished, but took his degree in foreign travel, came home to find the study of the law too base a drudgery for so free a spirit, and so took to living like a "gentleman," and to illustrating the devilishness of that career by reproducing it in dramas on the stage.
Sedley left Oxford as Etherege left Cambridge, ingloriously, bearing no honours with him. Unlike Sir George, however, he was a home-keeping youth, whereby his wit seems not to have suffered. He nursed the latter in the groves, or at the paternal hearth at Aylesford, in Kent, till the sun of the restored monarchy enticed him to London. There his wit recommended him to the King, won for him the hatred of small minds, and elicited the praise of noble spirits, who were witty themselves, and loved the manifestation of wit in others. "I have heard," says honest, brilliant, and much-abused Shadwell, "I have heard Sedley speak more wit at a supper than all my adversaries, putting their heads together, could write in a year." This testimony was rendered by a man whose own reputation as a wit has the stamp and the warrant of Rochester.
Two more atrocious libertines than these two men were not to be found in the apartments at Whitehall, or in the streets, taverns, and dens of London. Yet both were famed for like external qualities. Etherege was easy and graceful, Sedley so refinedly seductive of manner that Buckingham called it "witchcraft," and Wilmot "his prevailing, gentle art." I, humbler witness, can only say, after studying their works and their lives, that Etherege was a more accomplished comedy-writer than Sedley, but that Sedley was a greater beast than Etherege.
These two handsome fellows, made in God's image, marred their manly beauty by their licentiousness, and soon looked more like two battered, wine-soaked demons, than the sons of Christian mothers. Etherege, however, fierce and vindictive as he could be under passion, was never so utterly brutalised in mind as Sedley, nor so cruel in his humours at any time. If Sedley got up that groundless quarrel with Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, the alleged cause of which was some painted hussey, it was doubtless out of the very ferocity of his fun, which he thought well spent on exhibiting the prelate as sharing in the vices common at court.
Etherege, perhaps, had the stronger head of the two; he, at all events, kept it sufficiently free to be able to represent his King on more than one small diplomatic mission abroad. Sedley, who was nevertheless the longer liver of the two, indulged in excesses which, from their inexpressible infamy, betray a sort of insanity. When he, with other blackguards of good blood, was brought to trial for public outrages, which disgusted even the hideous wretches that lurked about Covent Garden, Chief Justice Foster addressed him from the bench with a "Sirrah!" and told him, while the reminiscence of the plague and the smoke of the Great Fire still hung over the court, that it was such wretches as he that brought God's wrath so heavily upon the kingdom. But neither the heavy fine of 2000 marks, nor his imprisonment, nor his being bound over to keep the peace for three years, nor his own conscience, nor the rebuke of wise men, could restrain this miscreant. He was not yet free from his bond[52] when he, and Buckhurst and others were carried off to the watch-house by the night-constables for fighting in the streets, drunk, as was their custom, and as naked as their drawn swords. On this occasion, in 1668, the King interfered in their favour, and Chief Justice Keeling, senile betrayer of his trust, let them go scatheless; but he punished the constables by whom they had been arrested!
Etherege contributed three comedies to the stage:—"The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub," "She Would if She Could," and the "Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter." Sedley wrote the "Mulberry Garden;" a tragedy, called "Antony and Cleopatra," wherein a single incident in Shakspeare's play is spun out into five acts; "Bellamira," in which comedy, partly founded on the "Eunuchus" of Terence, he exhibited the frailty of Lady Castlemaine, and the audacity of Churchill—a translated drama from the French, called the "Grumbler," and a tragedy, entitled the "Tyrant King of Crete." Of all Sedley's pieces, the best is the "Mulberry Garden,"[53] for portions of which the author is indebted to Molière's "Ecole des Maris," and on which Pepys's criticism is not to be gainsayed:—"Here and there a pretty saying, and that not very many either." "Bellamira" is remembered only as the play, during the first representation of which the roof of the Theatre Royal fell in, with such just discrimination as to injure no one but the author. Sir Fleetwood Shepherd said that "the wit of the latter had blown the roof from the building." "Not so," rejoined Sedley, "the heaviness of the play has broke down the house, and buried the author in the ruins!"
Etherege's comedies were, in their day, the dear delight of the majority of playgoers. I say the majority; for though "Love in a Tub" brought £1000 profit to Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, in a single month of 1664, and was acted before enraptured gallants and appreciating nymphs, at Whitehall, some found it a silly play. It gave Etherege a name and a position; and when his next comedy appeared, "She Would if She Could," a thousand anxious people, with leisure enough of an afternoon to see plays (it was only at Court that they were acted at night), were turned away from the doors. To me, this piece is very distasteful, and it is not without satisfaction I read that it was on the first night "barbarously treated," according to Dennis, and that Pepys found "nothing in the world good in it, and few people pleased with it." The plot and denouement he pronounces as "mighty insipid;" yet he says of the piece as a whole, that it was "dull, roguish, and witty." The actors, however, were not perfect on the first night. Dennis praised the truth of character, the purity, freedom, and grace of the dialogue; and Shadwell declared that it was the best comedy since the Restoration, to his own time. All this eulogy is not to be accepted. Etherege's third comedy, the "Man of Mode," has been described as "perhaps the most elegant comedy, and containing more of the real manners of high life than any one the English stage was ever adorned with." In the latter respect alone is this description true; but, though the piece is dedicated to a lady, the Duchess of York, it could have afforded pleasure, as the Spectator remarks, only to the impure. People, no doubt, were delighted to recognise Rochester in Dorimant, Etherege himself in Bellair, and the stupendous ass, Beau Hewitt, in Sir Fopling; but it must have been a weary delight; so debased is the nature of these people, however truly they represent, as they unquestionably did, the manners, bearing, and language of the higher classes.
How they dressed, talked, and thought; what they did, and how they did it; what they hoped for, and how they pursued it; all this, and many other exemplifications of life as it was then understood, may be found especially in the plays of Etherege, in which there is a bustle and a succession of incidents, from the rise to the fall of the curtain. But the fine gentlemen are such unmitigated rascals, and the women—girls and matrons—are such unlovely hussies, in rascality and unseemliness quite a match for the men, that one escapes from their wretched society, and a knowledge of their one object, and the confidences of the abominable creatures engaged therein, with a feeling of a strong want of purification, and of that ounce of civet which sweetens the imagination.
Of the remaining amateur writers there is not much to be said. Rhodes was a gentleman's son without an estate, a doctor without practice, and a dramatist without perseverance. His one comedy, "Flora's Vagaries" (1667), gave a capital part to Nelly, and a reputation to the doctor, which he failed to sustain. Corye was another idle gentleman, who, in the same year,[54] produced his "Generous Enemies," and that piece was a plagiarism. Ned Revet also exhausted himself in one comedy, "The Town Shifts," which the town found insipid. Arrowsmith was in like plight, and his sole comedy, "The Reformation," was obliged to give way to Shakspeare's "Macbeth," converted into an opera. Nevil Payne was the author of three pieces—"Fatal Jealousy," in which Nokes earned his name of Nurse Nokes; the "Morning Ramble," which was less attractive in 1673, than the "Tempest," even in an operatic form, or "Hamlet," with Betterton for the hero; and the "Siege of Constantinople," a tragedy, in which Shaftesbury and his vices were mercilessly satirised. Tom Rawlins wrote three poor plays, the last in 1678, and he had as great a contempt for the character of author as Congreve himself. He was, like Joe Harris, "engraver of the Mint," kept fellowship with wits and poets, wrote for amusement, and "had no desire to be known by a threadbare coat, having a calling that will maintain it woolly!" Then there was Leanard, who stole not more audaciously than he was stolen from, when he chose to be original—Colley Cibber having taken many a point from the "Counterfeits," to enrich "She Would and She Would Not." Pordage was about as dull a writer as might be expected of a man who was land-steward to "the memorable simpleton," Philip, Earl of Pembroke. Shipman enjoys the fame of having been highly esteemed by Cowley—he certainly was not by the public; and Bancroft, the surgeon, had the reputation of having been induced to write, as he did, unsuccessfully, for the stage, because he prescribed for, or rather against, the most fashionable malady of the day, when it attacked theatre-haunting fops and actors who stooped to imitate the gentlemen. From these he caught the stage fever, and suffered considerably. Whitaker's one play, "The Conspiracy," is remarkable for the sensation incident of a ghost appearing, leading Death by the hand! Maidwell's comedy of "The Loving Enemies" (the author was an old schoolmaster), was noticeable for being "designedly dull, lest by satirising folly the author might bring upon his skull the bludgeon of fools."[55] Saunders, and his "Tamerlane the Great," are now forgotten; but Dryden spoke of the author, in an indecent epilogue, as "the first boy-poet of our age;" who, however, though he blossomed as early as Cowley, did not flourish as long.