most European nations) there is a sort of justice. A man can
generally retain his wife's affections if he will behave himself like
a man; and 'injured husbands' have for the most part no one to blame
but themselves. But the matter is not a subject for comedy; not even
in that case which has been always too common in France, Italy, and
the Romish countries, and which seems to have been painfully common
in England in the seventeenth century, when, by a mariage de
convenance, a young girl is married up to a rich idiot or a decrepit
old man. Such things are not comedies, but tragedies; subjects for
pity and for silence, not for brutal ribaldry. Therefore the men who
look on them in the light which the Stuart dramatists looked are not
good men, and do no good service to the country; especially when they
erect adultery into a science, and seem to take a perverse pleasure
in teaching their audience every possible method, accident, cause,
and consequence of it; always, too, when they have an opportunity,
pointing 'Eastward Ho!' i.e. to the city of London, as the quarter
where court gallants can find boundless indulgence for their passions
amid the fair wives of dull and cowardly citizens. If the citizens
drove the players out of London, the playwrights took good care to
have their revenge. The citizen is their standard butt. These
shallow parasites, and their shallower sovereigns, seem to have taken
a perverse and, as it happened, a fatal pleasure in insulting them.
Sad it is to see in Shirley's 'Gamester,' Charles the First's
favourite play, a passage like that in Act i. Scene 1, where old
Barnacle proclaims, unblushing, his own shame and that of his fellow-
merchants. Surely, if Charles ever could have repented of any act of
his own, he must have repented, in many a humiliating after-passage
with that same city of London, of having given those base words his
royal warrant and approbation.