‘’Tis the good man’s office To serve and reverence woman, as it is The fire’s to burn; for as our souls consist Of sense and reason, so do yours, more noble, Of sense and love, which doth as easily calm All your desires, as reason quiets ours. . . . Love, then, doth work in you, what Reason doth In us; here only lies the difference,— Ours wait the lingering steps of Age and Time; But the woman’s soul is ripe when it is young; So that in us what we call learning, is Divinity in you, whose operations, Impatient of delay, do outstrip time.’
For the sake of such words, in the midst of an evil and adulterous generation, we will love young Cartwright, in spite of the suspicion that, addressed as the play is to Charles, and probably acted before his queen, the young rogue had been playing the courtier somewhat, and racking his brains for pretty sayings which would exhibit as a virtue that very uxoriousness of the poor king which at last cost him 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.