published in 1698; it attacked a real evil, if not always in the right way, and Congreve’s reply to it had been a failure.  Steele’s comedies with all their gaiety and humour were wholly free from the garnish of oaths and unwholesome expletives which his contemporaries seemed to think essential to stage emphasis.  Each comedy of his was based on seriousness, as all sound English wit has been since there have been writers in England.  The gay manner did not conceal all the earnest thoughts that might jar with the humour of the town; and thus Steele was able to claim, by right of his third play, ’the honour of being the only English dramatist who had had a piece damned for its piety.’

This was the ‘Lying Lover’, produced in 1704, an adaptation from Corneille in which we must allow that Steele’s earnestness in upholding truth and right did cause him to spoil the comedy.  The play was afterwards re-adapted by Foote as the ‘Liar’, and in its last form, with another change or two, has been revived at times with great success.  It is worth while to note how Steele dealt with the story of this piece.  Its original is a play by Alarcon, which Corneille at first supposed to have been a play by Lope de Vega.  Alarcon, or, to give him his full style, Don Juan Ruiz de Alarcon y Mendoza, was a Mexican-born Spaniard of a noble family which had distinguished itself in Mexico from the time of the conquest, and took its name of Alarcon from a village in New Castile.  The poet was a humpbacked dwarf, a thorough, but rather haughty, Spanish gentleman, poet and wit, who wrote in an unusually pure Spanish style; a man of the world, too, who came to Spain in or about the year 1622, and held the very well-paid office of reporter to the Royal Council of the Indies.  When Alarcon, in 1634, was chosen by the Court to write a festival drama, and, at the same time, publishing the second part of his dramatic works, vehemently reclaimed plays for which, under disguised names, some of his contemporaries had taken credit to themselves, there was an angry combination against him, in which Lope de Vega, Gongora, and Quevedo were found taking part.  All that Alarcon wrote was thoroughly his own, but editors of the 17th century boldly passed over his claims to honour, and distributed his best works among plays of other famous writers, chiefly those of Rojas and Lope de Vega.  This was what deceived Corneille, and caused him to believe and say that Alarcon’s ‘la Verdad sospechosa’, on which, in 1642, he founded his ‘Menteur’, was a work of Lope de Vega’s.  Afterwards Corneille learnt how there had been in this matter lying among editors.  He gave to Alarcon the honour due, and thenceforth it is chiefly by this play that Alarcon has been remembered out of Spain.  In Spain, when in 1852 Don Juan Hartzenbusch edited Alarcon’s comedies for the Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles, he had to remark on the unjust neglect of that good author in Spain also, where the poets and men of letters had long wished in vain for a complete edition of his works.  Lope de Vega, it may be added, was really the author of a sequel to ‘la Verdad sospechosa’, which Corneille adapted also as a sequel to his ‘Menteur’, but it was even poorer than such sequels usually are.