his head. The 'Royal Slave,' too, is a gallant play, right-hearted
and lofty from beginning to end, though enacted in an impossible
court-cloud-world, akin to that in which the classic heroes and
heroines of Corneille and Racine call each other Monsieur and Madame.

As for his humour; he, alas! can be dirty like the rest, when
necessary: but humour he has of the highest quality. 'The Ordinary'
is full of it; and Moth, the Antiquary, though too much of a lay
figure, and depending for his amusingness on his quaint antiquated
language, is such a sketch as Mr. Dickens need not have been ashamed
to draw.

The 'Royal Slave' seems to have been considered, both by the Court
and by his contemporaries, his masterpiece. And justly so; yet our
pleasure at Charles's having shown, for once, good taste, is somewhat
marred by Langbaine's story, that the good acting of the Oxford
scholars, 'stately scenes, and richness of the Persian habits,' had
as much to do with the success of the play as its 'stately style,'
and 'the excellency of the songs, which were set by that admirable
composer, Mr. Henry James.' True it is, that the songs are
excellent, as are all Cartwright's; for grace, simplicity, and
sweetness, equal to any (save Shakspeare's) which the seventeenth
century produced: but curiously enough, his lyric faculty seems to
have exhausted itself in these half-dozen songs. His minor poems are
utterly worthless, out Cowleying Cowley in frigid and fantastic
conceits; and his varied addresses to the king and queen are as
bombastic and stupid and artificial as anything which bedizened the
reigns of Charles II. or his brother.

Are we to gather from this fact that Cartwright was not really an