There are some books, like some people, of whom we form an indulgent opinion without finding it easy to justify our liking.  The young man who went to the life-insurance office and reported that his father had died of no particular disease, but just of “plain death,” would sympathise with the feeling I mention.  Sometimes we like a book, not for any special merit, but just because it is what it is.  The rare, and yet not celebrated, miscellany of which I am about to write has this character.  It is not instructive, or very high-toned, or exceptionally clever, but if it were a man, all people that are not prigs would say that it was a very good sort of fellow.  If it be, as it certainly is, a literary advantage for a nondescript collection of trifles, to reproduce minutely the personality of its writer, then Love and Business has one definite merit.  Wherever we dip into its pages we may use it as a telephone, and hear a young Englishman, of the year 1700, talking to himself and to his friends in the most unaffected accents.

Captain George Farquhar, in 1702, was four-and-twenty years of age.  He was a smart, soldier-like Irishman, of “a splenetic and amorous complexion,” half an actor, a quarter a poet, and altogether a very honest and gallant gentleman.  He had taken to the stage kindly enough, and at twenty-one had written Love and a Bottle.  Since then, two other plays, The Constant Couple and Sir Harry Wildair, had proved that he had wit and fancy, and knew how to knit them together into a rattling comedy.  But he was poor, always in pursuit of that timid wild-fowl, the occasional guinea, and with no sort of disposition to settle down into a heavy citizen.  In order to bring down a few brace of golden game, he shovels into Lintott’s hands his stray verses of all kinds, a bundle of letters he wrote from Holland, a dignified essay or discourse upon Comedy, and, with questionable taste perhaps, a set of copies of the love-letters he had addressed to the lady who became his wife.  All this is not very praiseworthy, and as a contribution to literature it is slight indeed; but, then, how genuine and sincere, how guileless and picturesque is the self-revelation of it!  There is no attempt to make things better than they are, nor any pandering to a cynical taste by making them worse.  Why should he conceal or falsify?  The town knows what sort of a fellow George Farquhar is.  Here are some letters and some verses; the beaux at White’s may read them if they will, and then throw them away.

As we turn the desultory pages, the figure of the author rises before us, good-natured, easygoing, high-coloured, not bad-looking, with an air of a gentleman in spite of his misfortunes.  We do not know the exact details of his military honours.  We may think of him as swaggering in scarlet regimentals, but we have his own word for it that he was often in mufti.  His mind is generally dressed, he says, like his body,