Page:Miscellanies (IA miscellanies00swinrich).pdf/378

 moral and decorous reasons the purest masterpieces of foreign tragedy. Not that there is any great harm in this homebred farce, though it is extravagant in every sense at all points; rough and ready, coarse and boisterous, nautically jocose and erotic—rather flagrant of Wapping than fragrant of Whitehall. But it is as far from the deliberate and elaborate brutality of Wycherley, Shadwell, and Dryden himself, in their best and worst comedies, as from the daintier naughtiness and graceless grace of Etherege. Nor has it anything—in speaking of an English work produced in any but the age of Rochester it would be happily superfluous to certify that it had nothing—of the 'unspeakable' and ultra-Turkish taint which in that noble poet's contemporary alteration of Fletcher's Valentinian is rank enough to commend it even to the abnormal appetite of a moralist after the order of Petronius. But in an honest way' (as Prior has it) there is here undoubtedly no stint of that same'—in other words, of broad rampant full-blown merriment, playing noisily about the nuptial couch of a plebeian Alcmena. 'A younger brother,' as he describes himself, 'of the house of Mercury,' being in love with an usurer's daughter, whose 'father sent her husband of an errand, no man knows whither,' nine years before the action of the comedy begins, takes advantage of such a personal resemblance to the bridegroom as precludes the necessity of supernatural juggling or miraculous disguise to impose upon father and daughter alike the belief that the wanderer has returned in his person, rich enough to 'get children in embroidered coats'. As no deity could here be called in to loose the knot, 'to gild the pill,' and to announce the nativity of a Hercules, the playwright has hit on a happily ingenious device wherewith to reconcile controversy and to conciliate morality for this, unlike his politer fellows of the more courtly stage, the honest unknown has actually been at pains to accomplish by the expedient of assimilating the household arrangements of his Amphitryon and Alcmena to those of the couple corresponding to that Grecian pair in the scriptural record of Christian mythology. The