difference I can perceive. He has paraphased the French with a spirit
and ease which a mere translation can hardly ever acquire. The epilogue
to his play, written by M. Motteux, a Frenchman, whom the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes brought into England, is filthy in the extreme. Mr.
J. King has curtailed Vanbrugh's play into an interlude, in one act,
called _Lover's Quarrels_, or _Like Master Like Man_.

Another imitator of Moliere was Edward Ravenscroft, of whom Baker says
in his _Biographia Dramatica_, that he was "a writer or compiler of
plays, who lived in the reigns of Charles II. and his two successors."
He was descended from the family of the Ravenscrofts, in Flintshire; a
family, as he himself, in a dedication asserts, so ancient that when
William the Conqueror came into England, one of his nobles married into
it.

He was some time a member of the Middle Temple; but, looking on the dry
study of the law as greatly beneath the attention of a man of genius,
quitted it. He was an arrant plagiary. Dryden attacked one of his plays,
_The Citizen turned Gentleman_, an imitation of Moliere's
_Bourgeois-Gentilhomme_, in the Prologue to _The Assignation_.

Ravenscroft wrote "_The Wrangling Lovers, or the Invisible
Mistress_. Acted at the Duke's Theatre, 1677. London, Printed for
William Crook, at the sign of the _Green Dragon_, without
_Temple-Bar_, 1677." Though the plot was partly taken from a
Spanish novel, the author has been inspired by Moliere's _Depit
amoureux_. The scene is in Toledo: Eraste is called Don Diego de
Stuniga, Valere Don Gusman de Haro, "a well-bred cavaliere," Lucile is
Octavia de Pimentell, and Ascanio is Elvira; Gros-Rene's name is Sanco,
"vallet to Gusman, a simple pleasant fellow," and Mascarille is Ordgano,