LIMBERHAM.


The extreme indelicacy of this play would, in the present times
furnish ample and most just grounds for the unfavourable reception it
met with from the public. But in the reign of Charles II. many plays
were applauded, in which the painting is, at least, as coarse as that
of Dryden. "Bellamira, or the Mistress," a gross translation by Sir
Charles Sedley of Terence's "Eunuchus," had been often represented
with the highest approbation. But the satire of Dryden was rather
accounted too personal, than too loose. The character of Limberham has
been supposed to represent Lauderdale, whose age and uncouth figure
rendered ridiculous his ungainly affectation of fashionable vices. Mr
Malone intimates a suspicion, that Shaftesbury was the person levelled
at, whose lameness and infirmities made the satire equally poignant.
In either supposition, a powerful and leading nobleman was offended,
to whose party all seem to have drawn, whose loose conduct, in that
loose age, exposed them to be duped like the hero of the play. It is a
singular mark of the dissolute manners of those times, that an
audience, to whom matrimonial infidelity was nightly held out, not
only as the most venial of trespasses, but as a matter of triumphant
applause, were unable to brook any ridicule, upon the mere transitory
connection formed betwixt the keeper and his mistress. Dryden had
spared neither kind of union; and accordingly his opponents exclaimed,
"That he lampooned the court, to oblige his friends in the city, and
ridiculed the city, to secure a promising lord at court; exposed the