scurrility, and was adroit at logical fence. He was a most unsparing controversialist. Swift, while professing abhorrence of his political principles, warmly praised his services to the Anglican church.

Johnson

declared him the only reasoner among the nonjurors, and "a reasoner who was not to be reasoned against."-RIGG, J. M., 1893, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XXXIII, p. 82.

PERSONAL

If his exceeding great value of himself do not deprive the world of that usefulness that his parts, if rightly conducted, might be of, I shall be very glad.--The hopes young men give of what use they will make of their parts is, to me, the encouragement of being concerned for them; but, if vanity increases with age, I always fear whither it will lead a man. -LOCKE, JOHN, 1697? Letters.

A lover of all literature, and knowing more than ten languages; a champion for truth, an assertor of liberty, but the follower or dependant of no man; nor could menaces nor fortune bend him; the way he had chosen he pursued, preferring honesty to his interest. His spirit is joined with its ethereal father from whom it originally proceeded; his body likewise, yielding to Nature, is again laid in the lap of its mother: but he is about to rise again in eternity, yet never to be the same Toland more -TOLAND, JOHN, 1722, Epitaph.

The name of Toland is more familiar than his character, yet his literary portrait has great singularity; he must be classed among the "Authors by Profession," an honour secured by near fifty publications; and we shall discover that he aimed to combine with the literary character one peculiarly his own. With higher talents and more learning than

have been conceded to him, there ran in his mind an original vein of thinking. Yet his whole life exhibits in how small a degree great intellectual powers, when scattered through all the forms which Vanity suggests, will contribute to an author's social comforts, or raise him in public esteem. Toland was fruitful in his productions, and still more so in his projects; yet it is mortifying to estimate the result of all the intense activity of the life of an author of genius, which terminates in being placed among these Calamities. He was so confirmed an author, that he never published one book without promising another. He refers to others in MS.; and some of his most curious works are posthumous. He was a great artificer of title pages, covering them with a promising luxuriance; and in this way recommended his works to the booksellers. He had an odd taste for running inscriptions of whimsical crabbed terms; the gold-dust of erudition to gild. over a title.-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1812-13, The Victims of Vanity, Calamities of Authors.

From his earliest days Toland was a mere waif and stray, hanging loose upon society, retiring at intervals into the profoundest recesses of Grub Street, emerging again by fits to scandalise the whole respectable world, and then once more sinking back into tenfold obscurity. His

career is made pathetic by his incessant efforts to clutch at various supports, which always gave way as he grasped them. The illegitimate son, as it was said, probably out of mere malice, of an Irish priest, he became a convert to Protestantism at sixteen, and was supported by certain dissenters at Glasgow, Leyden, and Oxford. He repaid their generosity by acquiring a considerable

there was nothing mysterious in an all powerful Being breaking through the order of nature. Professor Ferrier styles him "but a poor writer," and charges him with "dulness, pedantry, vanity, and indiscretion."-MINTO, WILLIAM, 1872-80, Manual of English Prose Literature, p. 399.

His works were never collected, and are now forgotten.-CHAMBERS, ROBERT, 1876, ruthers.

firing "Christianity not Mysterious" in their faces. It was a luckless performance so far as his temporal interests were concerned. The Grand Jury of Middlesex presented it as a nuisance; the uproar which it excited followed him to Dublin; there for a time he braved the storm, and was foolish enough to maintain his opinions at "coffee-houses and public tables;" whereas infidelity, till a much later period, was, like hair-powder, an acknowledged. perquisite of the aristocracy. Poor Toland fell into debt; it became dangerous to speak to him; and as South triumphantly declared, whilst wishing that English zeal were equally warm, "the (Irish) parliament, to their immortal honour, sent him packing, and, without the help of a faggot, soon made the kingdom too hot to hold him."-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1876, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. I, p. 101.

GENERAL

His "Christianity not Mysterious," 1696, caused none the less excitement than its quarrel with orthodoxy was chiefly concerning the word "mysterious." He accepted the Bible theory of the origin of sin, only labouring to make out that there was nothing mysterious about it. He did not repudiate miracles; he only held that

Toland was evidently a man of remarkable versatility and acuteness, and his first book struck the keynote of the long discussions as to the relation between the

religion of nature and the accepted doctrines. He showed also an acute percepinquiries into the origin of creeds, though tion of the importance of historical his precarious circumstances prevented him from carrying out continuous studies. His contemporaries held that vanity led him to a rash exposition of crude guesses. Allowance must be made for the unfortunate circumstances which compelled him to make a living in the ambiguous position of a half-recognised political agent and a hack-author dependent upon the patronage of men in power. Some of his writings were respectfully criticised by Leibnitz, and he was in intercourse with some of the ablest men of his time. He is generally noticed along with Collins and Tindal as the object of the contempt of respectable divines, but deserved real credit as a pioneer of freethought. He had read widely and knew many languages, including Irish, which he had learned in his infancy (see his "History of the Druids), and some of the Teutonic languages. STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1898, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. LVI, p. 441.

never stands still; the situations succeed one another like the changes of scenery in a pantomime. The nice dove-tailing of the incidents, and cross-reading in the situations, supplies the place of any great force of wit or sentiment. The time for the entrance of each person on the stage is the moment when they are wanted, and when they arrive make either themselves or somebody else look as foolish as possible. The laughableness of this comedy, as well as of "The Wonder," depends on a brilliant series of mistimed exits and entrances. Marplot is the whimsical hero of the piece, and a standing memorial of unmeaning vivacity and assiduous impertinence.-HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1818, Lectures on the English Comic Writers, Lecture viii.

"The Busy Body" still keeps the stage; for, though many years have elapsed since its performance in London, where various circumstances combine to limit the regular stock pieces within very narrow bounds, it continues to find favour in the country, being not unfrequently acted at some of the most distinguished of the provincial theatres. DUNHAM, S. ASTLEY, 1838, ed., Literary and Scientific Men of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. III, p. 315.

THE WONDER

1714

The "Wonder" is one of the best of our acting plays. The passion of jealousy in Don Felix is managed in such a way as to give as little offence as possible to the audience, for every appearance combines to excite and confirm his worse suspicions, while we, who are in the secret, laugh at his groundless uneasiness and apprehensions. The ambiguity of the heroine's situation, which is like a continued practical equivoque, gives rise to a quick succession of causeless alarms, subtle excuses, and the most hair-breadth 'scapes. The scene near the end, in which Don Felix, pretending to be drunk, forces his way out of Don Manuel's house, who wants to keep him a prisoner, by producing his marriage-contract in the shape of a pocket-pistol, with the terrors and confusion into which the old gentleman is thrown by this sort of argumentum ad hominem, is one of the richest treats the stage affords, and calls forth incessant peals of laughter and applause.-HAZLITT,

WILLIAM, 1818, Lectures on the English Comic Writers, Lecture viii.

The busy, bustling nature of the plot, the excellence of the situations which it affords, and the skilful portraiture of the characters, have, in themselves, without much assistance from the dialogue, which, though pertinent and lively, has little or no pretensions to wit, enabled this play to keep the stage down to the present day. -DUNHAM, S. ASTLEY, 1838, ed., Literary and Scientific Men of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. III, p. 316.

In the elegance and brilliancy of its dialogue, and in the effectiveness of its situations, no comedy of Mrs. Centlivre's approaches "The Wonder." This is perhaps best shown by the fact that its chief character, so often played by him, was chosen by Garrick for his last appearance on the stage. He had thought of making his farewell in Richard III., but he dreaded the fight and the fall, and on reflection preferred to be remembered associated with the mad gayety of the jealous and choleric Don Felix, rather than with the sombre villainy of the crook-backed king. -HUNTINGTON, H. A., 1882, Mrs. Centlivre, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 49, p. 762.

A BOLD STROKE FOR A WIFE

1718

A truly excellent comedy.-Arnold, THOMAS, 1862-87, A Manual of English Literature, p. 246, note.

The "Bold Stroke for a Wife" is entirely her own, and has had a wonderful succession of Colonel Feignwells, from C. Bullock down to Mr. Graham! This piece, however, was but moderately successful; but it has such vivacity, fun, and quiet humor in it, that it has outlived many a one that began with greater triumph, and in "the real Simon Pure," first acted by Griffin, it has given a proverb to the English language.-DORAN, JOHN, 1863, Annals of the English Stage, vol. 1, p. 168.

GENERAL

From a mean parentage and education, after several gay adventures (over which we shal draw a veil), she had, at last, so well improv'd her natural genius by reading and good conversation, as to attempt to write for the stage, in which she had as good success as any of her sex before her. Her first dramatic performance was a tragi-comedy called "The Perjur'd

Husband," but the plays which gained her most reputation were two comedies, "The Gamester" and "The Busy Body." She writ also several copies of verses on divers subjects and occasions, and a great many ingenious letters, entitled "Letters of Wit, Politics, and Morality," which I collected and published about twenty-one years ago. BOYER, ABEL, 1729? Political State, vol. XXVI, p. 670.

Almost the last of our writers who ventured to hold out in the prohibited track was a female adventurer, Mrs. Centlivre, who seemed to take advantage of the privilege of her sex, and to set at defiance the cynical denunciations of the angry puritanical reformist. Her plays have a provoking spirit and volatile salt in them, which still preserves them, from decay. Congreve is said to have been jealous of their success at the time, and that it was one cause which drove him in disgust from the stage. If so, it was without any good reason, for these plays have great and intrinsic merit in them, which entitled them to their popularity

and besides, their merit was of a kind entirely different from his own. -HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1818, Lectures on the English Comic Writers, Lecture viii.

Mrs. Centlivre had unobtrusive humor, sayings full of significance rather than wit, wholesome fun in her comic, and earnestness in her serious, characters. Mrs. Centlivre, in her pictures of life, attracts the spectator. There may be, now and then, something, as in Dutch pictures, which had been as well away; but this apart, all the rest is true, and pleasant, and hearty; the grouping perfect, the color faithful, and enduring too -despite the cruel sneer of Pope, who, in the "Life of Curll," sarcastically alludes to her as "the Cook's wife in Buckingham Court."-DORAN, JOHN, 1863, Annals of the English Stage, vol. I, p. 168.

Her comedies, whether original or not, -for several of these borrow their plots from foreign sources,-bear all an unmistakable family likeness to one another. Their authoress needed no indulgence as a playwright on the score of her sex; for not one among the dramatists contemporary with her better understood the construction of light comic actions, or the use of those conventional figures of comedy

which irresistibly appeal to the mirthful instincts of a popular audience. Inasmuch as she had no hesitation in resorting to the broadest expedients of farce, she was sure of the immediate effect which was all that her ambition desired; for she never flattered herself, as she confesses, "that anything she was capable of doing could support the Stage." In one instance, however, she virtually invented a personage of really novel humour; and in another she devised a character to which the genius of a great actor ensured a longenduring life on the boards. Marplot in "The Busy-Body" and Don Felix in "The Wonder" are creations upon which any comic dramatist might look back with satisfaction; and on the former, indeed, Mrs. Centlivre relies as conferring a real title to popular favour. As a rule, however, her characters are little more than thin outlines left to the actor to fill up. This cavil applies particularly to those of her comedies which are to all intents and purposes mere pictures of manners. WARD, ADOLPHUS WILLIAM, 1875-99, A History of English Dramatic Literature, vol. III, p. 488.

The comedies of Mrs. Centlivre are often ingenious and sprightly, and the comic scenes are generally brisk. Mrs. Centlivre troubled herself little about invention, "A Bold Stroke for a Wife,' being the only work for which she is at the pains to claim absolute originality. So far as regards the stage, she may boast a superiority over almost all her countrywomen, since two of her comedies remain in the list of acting plays. More than one other work is capable, with some alterations, of being acted. A keen politician, she displays in some of her dramatic writings a strong whig bias, which was in part responsible for their success. KNIGHT, JOSEPH, 1887, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. IX, p. 422.

The best of her plays are "The Busybody" and "A Bold Stroke for a Wife,' from the last of which comes at least one universally known and quoted phrase, "the real Simon Pure." They are nearer literature than Cibber's, but they are chiefly interesting because they show the change of taste. The theme is still intrigue, but it is almost always unsuccessful.—SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1898, A Short History of English Literature, p. 496.