_Wild._ Your petticoats, your petticoats, Madam. [_Lurewell shrieks and runs._] O my head! I was never worsted by a woman before. But I have heard so much to know the marquis to be a villain. [_Knocking._] Nay, then, I must run for’t. [_Runs out, and returns._] The entry is stopt by a chair coming in; and something there is in that chair that I will discover, if I can find a place to hide myself. [_Goes to the closet door._] Fast! I have keys about me for most locks about St. James’s. Let me see. [_Tries one key._] No, no; this opens my Lady Planthorn’s back-door. [_Tries another._] Nor this; this is the key to my Lady Stakeall’s garden. [_Tries a third._] Ay, ay, this does it, faith. [_Goes into the closet._]’
The dialogue between Cherry and Archer, in the Beaux’ Stratagem, in which she repeats her well-conned love catechism, is as good as this, but not so fit to be repeated any where but on the stage. The Beaux’ Stratagem is the best of his plays, as a whole; infinitely lively, bustling, and full of point and interest. The assumed disguise of the two principal characters, Archer and Aimwell, is a perpetual amusement to the mind. Scrub is an indispensable appendage to a country gentleman’s kitchen, and an exquisite confidant for the secrets of young ladies. The Recruiting Officer is not one of Farquhar’s best comedies, though it is light and entertaining. It contains chiefly sketches and hints of characters; and the conclusion of the plot is rather lame. He informs us, in the dedication to the published play, that it was founded on some local and personal circumstances that happened in Shropshire, where he was himself a recruiting officer; and it seems not unlikely, that most of the scenes actually took place at the foot of the Wrekin. The Inconstant is much superior to it. The romantic interest and impressive catastrophe of this play I thought had been borrowed from the more poetical and tragedy-practised muse of Beaumont and Fletcher; but I find they are taken from an actual circumstance which took place in the author’s knowledge, at Paris. His other pieces, Love and a Bottle, and the Twin Rivals, are not on a par with these; and are no longer in possession of the stage. The public are, after all, not the worst judges.—Farquhar’s Letters, prefixed to the collection of his plays, are lively, good humoured, and sensible; and contain, among other things, an admirable exposition of the futility of the dramatic unities of time and place. This criticism preceded Dennis’s remarks on that subject, in his Strictures on Mr. Addison’s Cato; and completely anticipates all that Dr. Johnson has urged so unanswerably on the subject, in his preface to Shakspeare.