"Let human kind their sovereign's leisure wait,
"Love is this night my great affair of state:
"Let this one night on providence be void:
"All Jove for once, is on himself employ'd.
In the next page Mrs. Townley says—
[Marriage, is not to be undertaken wantonly] like brute beasts. Do you not think this following speech of Truwits to Morose upon his sudden marriage, was not the father of Mrs. Townley's speech.
"Wou'd you go to bed so soon? a man of your head and hair should owe more to the reverend ceremony, and not mount the marriage-bed like a town-bull, &c.
The messages from his patients, I like the least of any thing in the whole play, tho' it is a just satire on those people of rank, that dare not be well without the advice of their physician: Yet I am angry at the countess of Hippokekoana, who is no other than the good dutchess of M—n—th, who generally took an emetick once a week. This lady had the misfortune to break her thigh-bone by a fall, but her modesty was so great, she would not allow the surgeons to apply any remedy; but by their advice, women took their office upon them, but performed it so ill, that the poor lady must go lame to her tomb. The annual day, on which her illustrious husband lost his head, she fasts the four and twenty hours: a rare example of conjugal-love! But indeed something of this whole scene may be picked out of Moliere.
In the scene between Tremendous, Clinket and the Players; that critick talks in the usual stile of Dennis—But in this speech of—
There is not in all this sodom of ignorance, ten righteous criticks—The triumvir makes a little too free with the old testament.
Those [letters that are given to the doctor in disguise of his footman, are something like several passages in Molier's Cecu imaginaire]. That sign'd Wyburn, I believe I need not inform you, is the most noted bawd in London. The character of [Lubomirski, may be found (at least something like it) in Lopez de Vega]; but his water of virginity, you may find something very like that in a play call'd the Changeling, written by Middleton and Rowley in conjunction, printed 1653.
Their Mummy may be found in a little piece in the [Theatre Italien], call'd the mummies of Egypt; and I believe the Nile furnish'd the Crocodile.
I begin to be tir'd my friend, and, therefore let me tell you, Mrs. Townley proving no wife to Fossile, may put you in mind of Ben Johnson's silent woman, and Congreve's old batchelor.