Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/161

Rh all his numerous plays, with scarcely an exception, and which is at once discoverable in this. The plot is weak, meagre, and ludicrously improbable. There are many smart things and broad and obvious jokes; but the dramatis personæ carry on contests of wit with each other, in which the action does not proceed. Its gross obscenity was doubtless owing much to the manners of the times; and how great the licence which prevailed is so well known to all acquainted with the history of those times, we need not enter upon the question. It is full, as most of the comedies of the next twenty years were, of constant allusions to the lowest vices, and the grossest sensuality.

In the words of Sir Walter Scott, "the licence of a rude age was then revived by a corrupted one." Dryden was much influenced by his own times, and had not the courage or independence to write what was moral, when it was not likely to satisfy the morbid craving of the public. The comedies now attempted by him and others were quite unlike those of the Elizabethan era. Though Jonson was much admired and occasionally played, yet the comedy of character was not the model of any of these dramatic writers, except Shadwell. They borrowed from the Spanish theatre, and aimed at intricacy of plot, sudden surprises, mistakes, disguises, and escapes.

"The Wild Gallant" was considered by Dryden himself as a failure; in the epilogue, he confesses that comedy is the most difficult kind of dramatic writing, though in his defence of his "Essay on Dramatic Poetry," written some years after, he makes some remarks which prove how low a view he took of his mission as a poet, and also the estimation in which he held his comic powers. "I confess," he writes, "my chief endeavours are to delight the age in which I live. If the humour of this be in low comedy, small accidents, and raillery, I will force my genius to obey L 2