Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/256

230 the true-hearted farmer and his granddaughter who, by her efforts to save the daughter of the self-seeking social striver, almost loses her own lover. These are all types, to be sure, but they are made alive and the dialogue is clever. The play had a great success here and abroad, and may be said to have founded a school of playwriting which lasts to this day. Its immediate successors, however, hardly came up to the standard set by Fashion. One of the best of them, Nature's Nobleman, produced in New York in 1851, was written by Henry O. Pardey, an English actor, who laid his scenes in Saratoga, Cape May, and a farm in New York State, and established quite well a contrast between American and English types. Mrs. Bateman's Self, E. G. Wilkins's Young New York, Cornelius Mathews's False Pretences; or, Both Sides of Good Society, all played in 1856, become caricature of a descending quality. Perhaps the most clever of the later comedies of social life is Americans in Paris by W. H. Hurlbert, performed in 1858.

In romantic comedy, there was very little that could compare with the achievement in romantic tragedy. The Deformed, played in 1830, by Richard Penn Smith, has some real merit, though it owes much to Dekker. Tortesa, the Usurer, by N. P. Willis, was played by J. W. Wallack in 1839 in New York and later in England, where Lester Wallack played Angelo to his father's Tortesa. It is an excellent play, and the last act, in which the usurer rises to the dignity of self-sacrifice, is especially appealing. Another play in which the two Wallacks were associated, The Veteran (1859), written by Lester Wallack, is an entertaining comedy laid in France and Algeria. Boker's Betrothal has already been mentioned. Mrs. Mowatt's Armand, or The Child of the People, produced in 1847 in New York and in 1849 in London, is a blank verse comedy of some merit. But here again the line between comedy and melodrama is hard to draw. Especially is this true in the plays dealing with Irish life, of which there are a number. One of the most interesting records in this connection is that describing the production, in 1842, after the playwright's death, of the adaptation of the novel of The Collegians by Louisa Medina. This play has not survived, but the