YOUNG GEORGE FARQUHAR: THE RESTORATION DRAMA AT TWILIGHT,

by Willard. Connely 'II. Cassell Co., Ltd.;1949; 349 pages; 21 shillings.

This book is a scholarly, sympathetic, very readable biography of the man whom its author regards as the merriest and most humane of the Restoration dramatists. Farquhar's principal achievements could invite merely paradoxical explanations. He wrote his liveliest comedy, The Beau Stratagem, on his death bed, in 1706, and so made the twilight of Restoration drama sunnier than its noon. But Mr. Connely proves that the contradictions or inconsistencies in the playwright's character and career were not very mysterious. In his youth, his conduct and language typified the absurd pseudo-classical cynicism of Restoration gallants (one of whom called a girl a "Scoundrel Nymph"); but, as he matured, his amatory disposition altered, and his libertinage became something more like love. Entrapped into marriage by a tedious widow, he studied Milton's tractates on divorce; and the most amusing result of Farquhar's personal experience with wedlock was the scene in his last play when Mr. and Mrs. Sullen divorce each other, on the stage, with dialogue as gay as a gypsy wedding. This was a dramatic novelty, but the real life of Captain George Farquhar appears to have been full of tragi-comic episodes. He greatly resembled his fictitious hero Mr. Archer, who

"fights, loves, and banters all in a breath." Although such a personage may not deserve our moral approbation, his idiosyncrasies are vastly diverting; and his biographer renders full justice to a very fascinating subject.