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362 of time cannot but be of some small interest at least to all students of English literature.

It is but too certain, on the other hand,—and I should be the last to question or dispute the certainty,—that no lover of Dryden's fame could wish to see any addition made to the already too long list of his comedies. Rather might we reasonably desire, were it possible, to strike off several of these from the roll and erase the record of their perpetration for ever. Why then, it will most properly and inevitably be asked,—why then be at pains to unearth an ugly and unsavoury relic of the Restoration—a word for which history, whether French or English, reads Degradation—on the chance that we may discover in such miry clay the impression of Dryden's great dishonoured hand? there were surely stains enough already on the broad hard outlines of its giant strength. And certainly, if I had but stumbled across a new sample of his indecent impotence and laborious incapacity in the heavy ploughed field of low comedy or farce, I should have had no thought but to let it lie. But if indeed there be anything of Dryden's in a long-forgotten play which was issued in his lifetime under cover of his approbation as containing a scene supplied by his own hand, it must be sought in one of two passages where the style suddenly changes from the roughest farce to the gravest and most high-toned rhetoric of which comedy can properly be capable.

In the year 1675 the too copious comic literature of the period was enlarged by the publication of 'The Mistaken Husband. A Comedie, as it is Acted by His Majesties servants At the Theatre-Royall. By a Person of Quality.—Hæc placuit semel.—[Hor.]' I should hardly have thought so, even then: at all events, we have no reason to suppose that on a tenth repetition it was found equally pleasing. Between title-page and prologue we find our only reason for taking notice of it, in the following address of 'the Bookseller to the Reader.'

"This Play was left in Mr. Dryden's hands many years since: The Author of it was unknown to him, and return'd not to claim