of a painted face viewed, after warm hours of dancing, in the morning
light. How could the Lurewells and the Plyants ever have been praised
for ingenuity in wickedness? Critics, apparently sober, and of high
reputation, held up their shallow knaveries for the world to admire.
These Lurewells, Plyants, Pinchwifes, Fondlewifes, Miss Prue, Peggy,
Hoyden, all of them save charming Milamant, are dead as last year's
clothes in a fashionable fine lady's wardrobe, and it must be an
exceptionably abandoned Abigail of our period that would look on them
with the wish to appear in their likeness. Whether the puppet show of
Punch and Judy inspires our street-urchins to have instant recourse to
their fists in a dispute, after the fashion of every one of the actors in
that public entertainment who gets possession of the cudgel, is open to
question: it has been hinted; and angry moralists have traced the
national taste for tales of crime to the smell of blood in our nursery-
songs. It will at any rate hardly be questioned that it is unwholesome
for men and women to see themselves as they are, if they are no better
than they should be: and they will not, when they have improved in
manners, care much to see themselves as they once were. That comes of
realism in the Comic art; and it is not public caprice, but the
consequence of a bettering state. {2} The same of an immoral may be said
of realistic exhibitions of a vulgar society.

The French make a critical distinction in _ce qui remue_ from _ce qui
emeut_--that which agitates from that which touches with emotion. In the
realistic comedy it is an incessant _remuage_--no calm, merely bustling
figures, and no thought. Excepting Congreve's Way of the World, which
failed on the stage, there was nothing to keep our comedy alive on its
merits; neither, with all its realism, true portraiture, nor much
quotable fun, nor idea; neither salt nor soul.