Footnotes.
{30} Reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his beautiful and valuable edition of
Greene's works.
{33} One thing is certain: that damnable last scene at which the gorge
rises even to remember it is in execution as unlike the crudest phase of
Shakespeare's style as in conception it is unlike the idlest birth of his
spirit. Let us hope that so foul a thing could not have been done in
even tolerably good verse.
{42} It is not the least of Lord Macaulay's offences against art that he
should have contributed the temporary weight of his influence as a critic
to the support of so ignorant and absurd a tradition of criticism as that
which classes the great writer here mentioned with the brutal if "brawny"
Wycherley--a classification almost to be paralleled with that which in
the days of our fathers saw fit to couple together the names of Balzac
and of Sue. Any competent critic will always recognise in _The Way of
the World_ one of the glories, in _The Country Wife_ one of the
disgraces, of dramatic and of English literature. The stains discernible
on the masterpiece of Congreve are trivial and conventional; the mere
conception of the other man's work displays a mind so prurient and
leprous, uncovers such an unfathomable and unimaginable beastliness of
imagination, that in the present age at least he would probably have
figured as a virtuous journalist and professional rebuker of poetic vice
or artistic aberration.
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