Harry. Or a poet a fool.
Dick. Then here’s a health to the most fools in the world.
Capt. Then you must drink a health to the whole world, that is one great fool.
Lieut. Prithee Dick, do not drink that health, for it will choak thee, for the world of fools is too big for one draught.
Dick. Then here’s a health to the wisest man.
Cornet. You may as well drink a health to a drop of water in the ocean.
Possibly the reader may think that a little of this sort of wit goes a long way. Unfortunately, in the Duchess’s plays, there is a vast amount of it.
It is a remarkable sign of the times in which she lived, especially of the moral tone and the taste of those times, that, although the Duchess of Newcastle was a most virtuous woman, and one of high principles—Ballard[178] says that she was “truly pious, charitable and generous: was an excellent economist, very kind to her servants, and a perfect pattern of conjugal love and duty”—yet her plays were of such a character that, as they stand, the most lenient official censor of our generation would certainly refuse to allow them to be acted: nor is it too much to say of them that they combine indecency and obscenity with the stagnate dullness so usually the accompaniment of literary ditch-water. Yet in the Preface to one of her books she says: “I hope this work of mine will rather quench amorous passions than inflame them, and beget chaste thoughts,” etc.
[178] Memoirs of British Ladies who have been celebrated for their Writings, etc., by George Ballard, ed. 1785, p. 213.
The critics of the plays and other works of the Duchess were very far from being of one and the same mind. Some half century after her death, Horace Walpole, in his Royal and Noble Authors, says that “though she had written philosophy it seems she had read none,” and that she had an “unbounded passion for scribbling”.