a duel by one Beaumont, mortally as is supposed. This bye-plot runs
through the play, giving an opportunity for bringing in a father of
the usual play-house type,--a Sir Richard Hurry, who is, of course,
as stupid, covetous, proud, and tyrannical and unfeeling, as play-
house fathers were then bound to be: but it is a plot of the most
commonplace form, turning on the stale trick of a man expecting to be
hanged for killing some one who turns out after all to have
recovered, and having no bearing whatsoever on the real plot, which
is this,--Mrs. Wilding, in order to win back her husband's
affections, persuades Penelope to seem to grant his suit; while Mrs.
Wilding herself is in reality to supply her niece's place, and shame
her husband into virtue. Wilding tells Hazard of the good fortune
which he fancies is coming, in scenes of which one can only say, that
if they are not written for the purpose of exciting the passions, it
is hard to see why they were written at all. But, being with Hazard
in a gambling-house at the very hour at which he is to meet Penelope,
and having had a run of bad luck, he borrows a hundred pounds of
Hazard, stays at the table to recover his losses, and sends Hazard to
supply his place with the supposed Penelope. A few hours before
Penelope and Hazard have met for the first time, and Penelope
considers him, as she says to herself aside, 'a handsome gentleman.'
He begins, of course, talking foully to her; and the lady, so far
from being shocked at the freedom of her new acquaintance, pays him
back in his own coin in such good earnest that she soon silences him
in the battle of dirt-throwing. Of this sad scene it is difficult to
say whether it indicates a lower standard of purity and courtesy in
the poet, in the audience who endured it, or in the society of which
it was, of course, intended to be a brilliant picture. If the
cavaliers and damsels of Charles the First's day were in the habit of
talking in that way to each other (and if they had not been, Shirley