In sharp contrast with these heroic plays was the comic drama of the Restoration, the plays of Wycherley, Killigrew, Etherege, Farquhar, Van Brugh, Congreve, and others; plays like the Country Wife, the Parson’s Wedding, She Would if She Could, the Beaux’ Stratagem, the Relapse, and the Way of the World.  These were in prose, and represented the gay world and the surface of fashionable life.  Amorous intrigue was their constantly recurring theme.  Some of them were written expressly in ridicule of the Puritans.  Such was the Committee of Dryden’s brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, the hero of which is a distressed gentleman, and the villain a London cit, and president of the committee appointed by Parliament to sit upon the sequestration of the estates of royalists.  Such were also the Roundheads and the Banished Cavaliers of Mrs. Aphra Behn, who was a female spy in the service of Charles II., at Antwerp, and one of the coarsest of the Restoration comedians.  The profession of piety had become so disagreeable that a shameless cynicism was now considered the mark of a gentleman.  The ideal hero of Wycherley or Etherege was the witty young profligate, who had seen life, and learned to disbelieve in virtue.  His highest qualities were a contempt for cant, physical courage, a sort of spendthrift generosity, and a good-natured readiness to back up a friend in a quarrel, or an amour.  Virtue was bourgeois——­reserved for London trades-people.  A man must be either a rake or a hypocrite.  The gentlemen were rakes, the city people were hypocrites.  Their wives, however, were all in love with the gentlemen, and it was the proper thing to seduce them, and to borrow their husbands’ money.  For the first and last time, perhaps, in the history of the English drama, the sympathy of the audience was deliberately sought for the seducer and the rogue, and the laugh turned against the dishonored husband and the honest man.  (Contrast this with Shakspere’s Merry Wives of Windsor.) The women were represented as worse than the men—­scheming, ignorant, and corrupt.  The dialogue in the best of these plays was easy, lively, and witty the situations in some of them audacious almost beyond belief.  Under a thin varnish of good breeding, the sentiments and manners were really brutal.  The loosest gallants of Beaumont and Fletcher’s theater retain a fineness of feeling and that politesse de caeur which marks the gentleman.  They are poetic creatures, and own a capacity for romantic passion.  But the Manlys and Horners of the Restoration comedy have a prosaic, cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts.