[38] This was the theatre built by Sir Christopher Wren in 1672.
[39] Peter Anthony Motteux, the wild and clever linguist and dramatist, who made the best English translation of Don Quixote. The Stage Coach, itself an adaptation, has little merit beyond its liveliness.
[40] The register of burial is dated a month later than the received date of his death. It reads simply: “23 May, George Falkwere, M.” The initial is the sapient sexton’s indication that this was neither a W (woman) nor a C (child). The spelling of the name betokens its usual and original pronunciation. The present famous porticoed church was not built for nineteen years after Farquhar died.
[41] The not altogether foolish censure has been cast upon the rogue Teague in The Twin Rivals that he speaks an impossible brogue, which might as well be Welsh. Farquhar did not succeed in transferring to paper the weird and unlovely Ulster dialect with which he was familiar in boyhood, and which had figured already in the third act of Henry the Fifth, in Jonson’s Irish masque, in Shadwell’s Lancashire Witches; which was simultaneously being used in his farce The Committee, by Dryden’s friend Howard, and which was afterwards to have good corroboration in Aytoun’s Massacre of the MacPherson. Farquhar employs it twice elsewhere, passably well in the case of Torlough Macahone of the parish of Curroughabegley (the personage who built a mansion-house for himself and his predecessors after him), and with lamentable flatness in that of Dugard in his last comedy. Dugard is a rival of the nursery-maid dear to almanac humorists, who is wont to exclaim: “Can’t ye tell boi me accint that ’tis Frinch Oi am!” It was one of Farquhar’s inartistic mistakes that he made no loving study of this or of anything touching nearly his own people. His Irishmen, with the exception of Roebuck, are either rascals or characterless nobodies. The name Teague, or Teig, which Howard had also employed, is old and pure North Irish; and no less pleasant an authority than George Borrow reminds us in the Romano Lavo-Lil that it is Danish in origin.
[42] Dear Dick Steele, in 1701, while Captain of Fusileers, had a duel thrust upon him; and in parrying, his sword pierced his man. To his remorse may be ascribed his hatred of the custom of duelling, expressed afterwards on every occasion. Steele owed his start in life to James Butler, Duke of Ormonde, who entered him among the boys on the Charterhouse foundation. This peer was grandfather to the man who failed George Farquhar.
[43] Mrs. Farquhar published in 1711 an octavo volume of the Plays, Letters, and Verses. Among the verses figures a poem of six cantos dedicated to the victorious Earl of Peterborough, entitled Barcelona. “It was found among my dear deceased husband’s writings,” says the widow, in her prefatory note. He was not at the siege, and it is possible that the six cantos were a manuscript copy of the effusion of some former comrade. Farquhar was the author of several songs, one, of highly didactic complexion, having emanated from him at the reputed age of ten. Of these, only two are of fair lyrical quality: the page’s song in Love and a Bottle, and “Tell me, Aurelia, tell me, pray,” which Robert Southey included in his collection.
[44] The Vicar of Wakefield dates from 1766. Almost twenty years before that, the immortal Partridge had remarked to Tom Jones, quoting his schoolmaster: “Polly matete cry town is my daskalon.” Noble nonsense hath her pedigree. Goldsmith, however, is not so likely to have taken his cue from Fielding.