Hide all the horrors of thy mournful

tale,

And let us guess the rest.

Por.

I've raised him up, And placed him in his chair, where, pale and faint,

He gasps for breath, and, as his life flows from him,

Demands to see his friends.

His serv

ants weeping, Obsequious to his orders, bear him hither.

(The back scene opens and discovers Cato.) Mar. O heaven, assist me in this dreadful hour

To pay the last sad duties to my father. Juba. These are thy triumphs, thy exploits, O Cæsar!

Luc. Now is Rome fallen indeed!

(Cato brought forward in his chair.) Cato. Here set me downPortius, come near me-are my friends embarked?

Can anything be thought of for their service?

Whilst I yet live, let me not live in vain.

-O Lucius, art thou here?-thou art too good!

Let this our friendship live between our

children;

Make Portius happy in thy daughter Lucia.

Alas! poor man, he weeps!-Marcia, my daughter

-Oh bend me forward!-Juba loves thee, Marcia.

A senator of Rome, while Rome survived, Would not have match'd his daughter with a king,

Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729), born in blin, son of a well-to-do Irish attorney, is educated and passed most of his life in gland. Like the later Irish dramatist teridan, he rose to prominence in both poli's and literature. Active and versatile, he ssed some of his early years in the army, d later contributed to political journalism, tered Parliament and was knighted. A felong friend of Addison, from the age of urteen, like him he won his chief fame by ntributing essays to The Tatler and The pectator, 1709-12.

The origin and influence of The Conscious overs and its type of play are what give he work its main interest. Of itself it is ot a particularly good play, and makes us mile oftener when the author did not intend e should than when he did. But all the ame it is a landmark of a profound change n social history and in the drama. in Steele's plays conscious morality, and sentinentalism, came into the drama of real life. n Elizabethan domestic tragedy, such as Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, here had been conscious morality, but with Steele we get a new combination and a new iterary effect.

Two chief influences led Steele to make the nnovation. In 1698 Jeremy Collier, a Nonjuring clergyman, had attacked the contemporary drama in his book A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, a work, though not without fallacies, remarkable for learning, wit, sobriety, and sense. On Steele it created a profound impression. Again, in 1701, while still in the army, he had published The Christian Hero, as a check on his own expansive though conscientious nature, declaring Christian principles a better guide for a man than the principles of honor so-called which were the ideals of most persons of station; the chief result of which book among his mates was that from being reckoned no undelightful companion he was soon reckoned a disagreeable fellow." Feeling a challenge to prove himself after all no prig, he undertook in 1701 to enliven his character" by the production of a comedy with the unexpected title The Funeral. This and several which followed, though not lacking cleverness and humor, are notable chiefly for their attempt to teach or at least not to offend morality and virtue. Thus he served both God and Mam

mon.

The Conscious Lovers was written later in

It

Steele's life, after the Spectator period. He worked over it for some two years; it appeared in 1722, and ran for twenty-six nights, which then meant a considerable success. evoked much discussion, especially as to act IV, where Bevil as a matter of principle avoids fighting a duel, the strongest and most genuine scene in the play. Steele states in his preface that he wrote the play for the sake of this point. Early in his life he had been forced into a duel, and came to feel keenly the iniquity of the conventional code of honor; in the play he imaginatively embodies and applies the principles which he had laid down in The Christian Hero. Other timely and practical matters which find a voice in the play are the question as to the relative dignity of the landed aristocracy and the merchant class, discussed by Sealand and the elder Bevil in act IV, and the duty of a father to look sharply into the character of the man to whom he is to intrust his daughter. At such points we feel a decidedly new and modern spirit, and are conscious, under the artificial exterior, of a humane and independent thinker. In other places we get a vivid light on the roughness of contemporary life, even among the sentimental; the coarse talk of Cimberton seems to anger the pride rather than to shock the modesty even of the proper Lucinda. Likewise we are surprised, though rather relieved, to hear this well-conducted young woman now and then exclaim "Deuce on 'em!" On the whole, however, the play represents rather things as they supposedly ought to be than as they,

are.

its moral idealism is more prominent>

than its realism. Some credit must doubt-> less be given to such plays as Steele's, as to novels like Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), also written against duelling, for such changes in public feeling as have, for example, abolished the duel from the AngloSaxon world. The seriousness which was genially satirized by Fielding through the mouth of Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews was one reason for the play's long hold on people —“I never heard of any plays fit for a Christian to read, but Cato and the Conscious Lovers; and, I must own, in the latter there are some things almost solemn enough for a sermon." The appealing emotionality of sentimental drama fitted it to be an instrument of social reform.

The words sentiment and sentimentalism as used of this and later plays have really two applications. They refer to a soft emotional

ism-pity, mild unpassionate love, gentle admiration, over-delicacy, and sensitiveness; and also to the fondness of the characters for sententious expression of laudable opinions. A man of sentiment" is a man of feeling, and given to moralizing. The development of sentimentalism, unlike that of classicism and romanticism, was not well defined enough to be called a movement; but all of them were alike in this, that each was at bottom merely a taste, a liking for a certain kind of esthetic impression, a liking which has always existed, but at a particular time became especially general and self-expressive. Since these plays attempted to substitute something harmless for the reckless wit and unscrupulous intrigue of Restoration comedy, they were cut off from a source of strong sensation and it may truly be said that sentimentalism is an endeavor not only to secure the ethical character which the earlier comedy had lacked, but also to retain the interest and piquancy which it had secured in another way. It remained for Goldsmith and Sheridan to show that comedy could abandon its licentiousness without substituting tears for laughter. Yet such was the genuine originality and vitality of sentimentalism that even these men, its enemies, could not escape its influence.

The sentimentalism of this play is not extreme or offensive, yet it is ever present. The delicacy of young Bevil toward his father is almost as fine-drawn as that of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's romantic heroine, later in the century, who had too much delicacy to tell her parents of a proposal of marriage. Old Bevil is arrogant and domineering, "yet their fear of giving each other pain is attended with constant mutual uneasiness." The music-master is introduced merely to let Bevil show that "the distinguishing part of a gentleman" is "to make his superiority of fortune as easy to his inferiors as he can," and to win for him Indiana's "smile of approbation." When we first see him he is laying in moral fuel for the day's run by reading Addison's Vision of Mirza. Bevil appears to us a prig, and we dislike him; he pays the penalty of practically all faultless heroes in realistic fiction. The reason for this all but universal feeling is not a mean and envious streak in human nature, but a pardonable resentment at seeing what we know to be rare and difficult represented as so easy as complete virtue is to these unnatural heroes. Indiana has all the swooning, clinging sensibility of a long line of later heroines; in the epoch of sensibility women were not expected to control themselves. The moral delicacy of the play is expressed in its very title. Alluding to the couplet with which Indiana closes the second act,

As conscious honor all his actions steers, So conscious innocence dispels my fears.the word "conscious" in "Conscious Lovers"

means "who know what they are abo "Conscious love" was a household substit for the reckless passion which the drama usually preferred.

The ideality, representing things as bett or more convenient than in life, is not ef fined to the characters. As a further sutst tute for dash and wit, we have an elabora plot in which probability is not allowed stand in the way of somewhat crude hu or the niceties of poetic justice in whi all things work together for good for the who love good, and in which the most childre disguises and intrigues are made to wes The facts of the world give way before the j terests of both the characters and the dra tist. Sentimental comedy is thoroughly art ficial and conventional in the elements of plot. There is a curious contrast between t highly sophisticated and fragile characte and the traditional sort of story throu which they move, with its disguises, lot lost children, new-found wills, and the li For free comedy in this play we have to m sort to Tom and Phillis, who are not bod by the code which trammels their betters, a who are an early instance of a device con mon in later novel and drama, a comie a every-day pair of lovers alongside a romant pair. No critic has failed to relish Ton4 description (III. i) of his Pyramus courtship of Phillis through the window-glas which she was cleaning. But unfortunates | this is only told, not acted.

The traditional, artificial character of th plot is partly accounted for by its soures. the Andria of Terence, to which the first t acts and the last are especially indebted almost every character and every essent incident in Steele's work has its counte part in the admirable Latin play. Glyceriu lost by her father in infancy and now k mistress of Pamphilus, turns into the de cate-minded Indiana, innocently support for a time by Bevil's bounty. Charinus, love with the girl whom Pamphilus fath would have him marry, jealously quarre: with his unwilling rival; from this Stee develops the incident of the averted du The recognition of the long-lost daughter : the end he does his best to make as plausi as it seems in Terence; even the change old Sealand's name is paralleled in Teren. by a change of the daughter's. It is of t greatest interest to see how the stock char! acters of Latin comedy-the tyrannical man, the wild son, the rascally slave- hav been translated as it were into the nati English vernacular, or refined into ideality.

The soundest estimate of this and h plays is that they are a hybrid, attemptin to combine the entertainment afforded t comedy with the dignity and uplift" of tragedy. The comic muse, grown too wik was to be reformed by the influence of h sedate sister. The idealized personalties