Dulcy - A Comedy in Three Acts #261234

Here is a familiar ring; no playwright who goes often to New York will find the tintin nabulation altogether strange to his ear, and all of our playwrights must go there to get for their work an Opinion that the rest of the country will later mistake for its own. N O, the Master of Strawberry, coming to Arlington Street in Town, and venturing to the theatre in spite of his age, high taste and the gout, was but follow ing an everlasting fashion when he thus sat upon that Silly Dr. Goldsmith and the Doctor's new Comedy. It happened to be She Stoops to Conquer, this lowest of all farces, not a Comedy at all, according to Mr. Walpole, who died only some twenty-four or twenty-five years after that First Night; not living long enough, of course, to alter his unfavorable opinion. For if there be, indeed, any everlasting fashion, it is the fashion of taking a slighting view of a con temporary — a fashion even more indestructible than the other fashion complementary to it, which is the fashion of taking a ponderously reverential view of ancient performers no longer rivals to the unconsciously jealous living. If silly Dr. Goldsmith had written She Stoops to Conquer seventy years sooner than he did that low farce might have borne a pleasanter flavor to Mr. Walpole, who in his Old age asked people to remember that he had known Pope and lived with Gray. He liked Gray better.