defiance of the conventions of comedy of sensibility, Macklin resisted the
pressure to allow Sir Pertinax to soften in the end and terminate the play
on a note of happy reconciliation and family harmony.

In thus preserving the toughness of Sir Pertinax consistently to the end,
Macklin remained true to the tradition of critical, satiric comedy that he
had been bred in but that by this time had almost disappeared. Protesting
against the refusal of a license for his play, in 1779, Macklin composed a
defense of satiric comedy. He insists upon the reformatory function of
comedy and upon the satiric method of performing this task. "The business
of the Stage," he says, "is to correct vice, and laugh at folly ... This
piece is in support of virtue, morality, decency, and the Laws of the
Land: it satirizes both public and private venality, and reprobates
inordinate passions and tyrannical conduct in a parent ... Now, with
regard to my comedy is it not just and salutary that the subtilty [_sic_],
pride, insolence, cunning, and the thorough-paced villany [_sic_] of a
backbiting Scotchman should be ridiculed? What a wretched state the Comic
Muse and the Stage would be reduced to, were the prohibition of laughing
at the corruption and other vices of the age to prevail!"[3] True the
Comic
Muse, long sick, as Garrick said in his prologue to _She Stoops to
Conquer_, had almost died, though farces had done something to sustain
her. Fielding's and Garrick's little satires had largely avoided
sentiment; and the personal, often gross farces of Foote had continued to
use ridicule. But even these lack the forceful pertinacity of Macklin's
denunciation of hypocrisy and vice. It is perhaps too bad that he fell so
far into caricature in the portraits of Lord Lumbercourt and his daughter,
that the main love stories do smack of sensibility, and that he turned his
hero into a mouthpiece for the opposition to the Tory ministries of the
early years of George III. And it is perhaps true that all the characters,