Crabtree and Sir
Benjamin--those poor snakes that live but in the sunshine of your
mirth--must be ripened by this hot-bed process of realization into
asps or amphisbaenas; and Mrs. Candour--O! frightful!--become a hooded
serpent. Oh! who that remembers Parsons and Dodd--the wasp and butterfly
of the _School for Scandal_--in those two characters; and charming
natural Miss Pope, the perfect gentle woman as distinguished from the
fine lady of comedy, in the latter part--would forego the true scenic
delight--the escape from life--the oblivion of consequences--the holiday
barring out of the pedant Reflection--those Saturnalia of two or three
brief hours, well won from the world--to sit instead at one of our
modern plays--to have his coward conscience (that forsooth must not
be left for a moment) stimulated with perpetual appeals--dulled rather,
and blunted, as a faculty without repose must be--and his moral vanity
pampered with images of notional justice, notional beneficence, lives
saved without the spectator's risk, and fortunes given away that cost
the author nothing?
No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as
this _manager's comedy_.
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