Comedy thus treated may be accepted as a version of the ordinary worldly understanding of our social life; at least, in accord with the current dicta concerning it.  The epigrams can be made; but it is uninstructive, rather tending to do disservice.  Comedy justly treated, as you find it in Moliere, whom we so clownishly mishandled, the Comedy of Moliere throws no infamous reflection upon life.  It is deeply conceived, in the first place, and therefore it cannot be impure.  Meditate on that statement.  Never did man wield so shrieking a scourge upon vice, but his consummate self-mastery is not shaken while administering it.  Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are made each to whip himself and his class, the false pietists, and the insanely covetous.  Moliere has only set them in motion.  He strips Folly to the skin, displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her better clothing, with the lesson Chrysale reads to Philaminte and Belise.  He conceives purely, and he writes purely, in the simplest language, the simplest of French verse.  The source of his wit is clear reason:  it is a fountain of that soil; and it springs to vindicate reason, common-sense, rightness and justice; for no vain purpose ever.  The wit is of such pervading spirit that it inspires a pun with meaning and interest. {5} His moral does not hang like a tail, or preach from one character incessantly cocking an eye at the audience, as in recent realistic French Plays:  but is in the heart of his work, throbbing with every pulsation of an organic structure.  If Life is likened to the comedy of Moliere, there is no scandal in the comparison.

Congreve’s Way of the World is an exception to our other comedies, his own among them, by virtue of the remarkable brilliancy of the writing, and the figure of Millamant.  The comedy has no idea in it, beyond the stale one, that so the world goes; and it concludes with the jaded discovery of a document at a convenient season for the descent of the curtain.  A plot was an afterthought with Congreve.  By the help of a wooden villain (Maskwell) marked Gallows to the flattest eye, he gets a sort of plot in The Double Dealer. {6} His Way of the World might be called The Conquest of a Town Coquette, and Millamant is a perfect portrait of a coquette, both in her resistance to Mirabel and the manner of her surrender, and also in her tongue.  The wit here is not so salient as in certain passages of Love for Love, where Valentine feigns madness or retorts on his father, or Mrs. Frail rejoices in the harmlessness of wounds to a woman’s virtue, if she ‘keeps them from air.’  In The Way of the World, it appears less prepared in the smartness, and is more diffused in the more characteristic style of the speakers.  Here, however, as elsewhere, his famous wit is like a bully-fencer, not ashamed to lay traps for its exhibition, transparently petulant for the train between certain ordinary words and the powder-magazine of the improprieties to be