Charles Lamb, in his ingenious essay on “The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century,” apologized for the Restoration stage, on the ground that it represented a world of whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws of morality had no application.  But Macaulay answered truly, that at no time has the stage been closer in its imitation of real life.  The theater of Wycherley and Etherege was but the counterpart of that social condition which we read of in Pepys’s Diary, and in the Memoirs of the Chevalier de Grammont.  This prose comedy of manners was not, indeed, “artificial” at all, in the sense in which the contemporary tragedy—­the “heroic play”—­was artificial.  It was, on the contrary, far more natural, and, intellectually, of much higher value.  In 1698 Jeremy Collier, a non-juring Jacobite clergyman, published his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, which did much toward reforming the practice of the dramatists.  The formal characteristics, without the immorality, of the Restoration comedy re-appeared briefly in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, 1772, and Sheridan’s Rivals, School for Scandal, and Critic, 1775-9; our last strictly “classical” comedies.  None of this school of English comedians approached their model, Moliere.  He excelled his imitators not only in his French urbanity—­the polished wit and delicate grace of his style—­but in the dexterous unfolding of his plot, and in the wisdom and truth of his criticism of life, and his insight into character.  It is a symptom of the false taste of the age that Shakspere’s plays were rewritten for the Restoration stage.  Davenant made new versions of Macbeth and Julius Caesar, substituting rime for blank verse.  In conjunction with Dryden, he altered the Tempest, complicating the intrigue by the introduction of a male counterpart to Miranda—­a youth who had never seen a woman.  Shadwell “improved” Timon of Athens, and Nahum Tate furnished a new fifth act to King Lear, which turned the play into a comedy!  In the prologue to his doctored version of Troilus and Cressida, Dryden made the ghost of Shakspere speak of himself as

  Untaught, unpracticed in a barbarous age.

Thomas Rymer, whom Pope pronounced a good critic, was very severe upon Shakspere in his Remarks on the Tragedies of the Last Age; and in his Short View of Tragedy, 1693, he said, “In the neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff, there is more humanity than, many times, in the tragical flights of Shakspere.”  “To Deptford by water,” writes Pepys, in his diary for August 20, 1666, “reading Othello, Moor of Venice; which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but, having so lately read the Adventures of Five Hours, it seems a mean thing.”