But there is no need to argue the question—­the public has decided it long since, and, except in indelicate ballets, and occasional rather French passages in farce, our modern stage is free from immorality.  Even in Garrick’s days, when men were not much more refined than in those of Queen Anne, it was found impossible to put the old drama on the stage without considerable weeding.  Indeed I doubt if even the liberal upholder of Paul de Kock would call Congreve a moral writer; but I confess I am not a competent judge, for risum teneatis, my critics, I have not read his works since I was a boy, and what is more, I have no intention of reading them.  I well remember getting into my hands a large thick volume, adorned with miserable woodcuts, and bearing on its back the title ‘Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar.’  I devoured it at first with the same avidity with which one might welcome a bottle-imp, who at the hour of one’s dulness turned up out of the carpet and offered you delights new and old for nothing but a tether on your soul:  and with a like horror, boy though I was, I recoiled from it when any better moment came.  It seemed to me, when I read this book, as if life were too rotten for any belief, a nest of sharpers, adulterers, cut-throats, and prostitutes.  There was none—­as far as I remember—­of that amiable weakness, of that better sentiment, which in Ben Jonson or Massinger reconcile us to human nature.  If truth be a test of genius, it must be a proof of true poetry, that man is not made uglier than he is.  Nay, his very ugliness loses its intensity and palls upon our diseased tastes, for want of some goodness, some purity and honesty to relieve it.  I will not say that there is none of this in Congreve.  I only know, that my recollection of his plays is like that of a vile nightmare, which I would not for anything have return to me.  I have read, since, books as bad, perhaps worse in some respects, but I have found the redemption here and there.  I would no more place Shandy in any boy’s hands than Congreve and Farquhar; and yet I can read Tristram again and again with delight; for amid all that is bad there stand out Trim and Toby, pure specimens of the best side of human nature, coming home to us and telling us that the world is not all bad.  There may be such touches in ‘Love for Love,’ or ’The Way of the World’—­I know not and care not.  To my remembrance Congreve is but a horrible nightmare, and may the fates forbid I should be forced to go through his plays again.

Perhaps, then, Jeremy was not far wrong, when he attacked these specimens of the drama with an unrelenting Nemesis; but he was before his age.  It was less the obvious coarseness of these productions with which he found fault than their demoralizing tendency in a direction which we should now, perhaps, consider innocuous.  Certainly the Jeremiad overdid it, and like a swift, but not straight bowler at cricket, he sent balls which no wicket-keeper could stop, and which, therefore,