pretentiousness in words like red-hot coals. In that scene she is transformed from a common adventuress to a "tragedy queen."

But Lillo's dramatic apogee is "The Fatal Curiosity,' in which Old Wilmot and Agnes his wife, driven to the breaking point of misery and destitution, murder the rich stranger who sleeps under their roof, unknowing that he is their son. It is a terrific piece of work, more like a typhoon than a play. But it is a managed, a directed, a controlled typhoon. And, piercing through the almost tangible darkness that envelops it, one is aware of a sound quality of workmanship. The divergent motives of Agnes and Old Wilmot are well contrasted. Agnes is at odds with her environment, personally and on behalf of her husband; Old Wilmot's passion is abstract-he is at odds with the universe. How true a reading of the masculine and feminine attitude! Crabb Robinson, who saw Mrs. Siddons play Agnes in 1797, tells us that he became so hysterical that he was all but turned out of the theatre in the idea that he was laughing by intention. I can well believe him. Here are a few passages:

When Agnes and Old Wilmot are fighting a psychological duel previous to the murder :

AGNES.

"Barbarous man!

Whose wasteful riots ruin'd our estate,

And drove our son, ere the first down that spread

His

rosy cheeks spite of my sad presages,

Earnest entreaties, agonies and tears,

To seek his bread amongst strangers, and to perish

In some remote, inhospitable land;

The loveliest youth, in person and in mind

That ever crown'd a groaning mother's pains!
Where was thy pity, where thy patience then?
Thou cruel husband, thou unnatʼral father!
Thou most remorseless, most ungrateful man,
To waste my fortune, rob me of my son;
To drive me to despair and then reproach me
For being what thou'st made me."

"Down, down, my swelling heart," says Old Wilmot in another passage. "Down, thou climbing sorrow, down! Hysterica Passio," groans Lear. When Old Wilmot first hears that he has killed his son:

"Prithee, peace:

The miserable damn'd suspend their howling,
And the swift orbs are fixt in deep attention."

When he has reaped the full discovery :

Compute the sands that bound the spacious ocean,
And swell their number with a single grain;

Increase the noise of thunder with thy voice;
Or when the raging wind lays nature waste
Assist the tempest with thy feeble breath;
Add water to the sea and fire to Etna

But name not thy faint sorrow with the anguish
Of a curst wretch who only hopes for this

(Stabbing himself)
To change the scene, but not relieve his pain."

Here, at least, is the echo of the great old days.

I do not want to claim too much for him. Hardly more than a minor, he is still very interesting as a kind of 66 sport in his age. Nor is he unlike the Elizabethans in their somewhat rancid taste for domestic crime alone.

Of course there are differences. He does not possess their romantic feeling or turn for figurative expression. But the texture and cadence of their blank verse are his : their power of extracting full-blooded and passionate speech out of a good or bad situation is his. Lillo is sometimes Byronic: so were the Elizabethans. He possesses their throb, their volcanic energy, their amplitude and bravery. Something too of their curious and intense exploration of human corruption is his-a symptom of that revulsion from the light-heartedness and cheerful patriotism (beloved of modern old gentlemen) attributed to the strictly Elizabethan period.

a

XXX

ON CANT

MY DEAR X,

In an era which has deluged us with seas of blood and drowned us in oceans of rhetoric, I am inclined to write you a short letter about cant-the word of God in the mouth of the Prince of Flies. You know as well as I do the thousand and one little contrivances patented in this age for setting poor humanity on his legs again. Compulsory examination of the "unfortunate class" (verè infelices !); state capitalism; conscription of the undesirables in lunatic asylums; Impropriety Leagues; Societies for the Endowment of Wars for the Emancipation of the Human Race; Committees for Propagating the Basic Truth of the Happiness of Death-you know all about them, you know, you know. But I confess I have little hope for the future unless I can discern some public feeling towards a Society for the Detection of Cant. No deviltry is more insidious, more demoralizing, more triumphant, and more secure. The whole epic of human endeavour may be bowdlerized by a single cant phrase in the margin. Cant is old and young, older than the legend of the wolf who cozened Red Riding Hood-or (better) the wolf that drank higher up than the sheep-and younger than this morning's newspaper poster. But take

it for all in all-as the Pandarus of the revolting angels and the pen of the latest advertising agent, we shall not (in this generation) see its like, I hope, again.

The first step was to look up "cant " in the dictionary. Nares says: "A corrupt dialect used by beggars and vagabonds"; Dr. Johnson: "A particular form of speaking peculiar to some certain class or body of men.” But cant in our day is a particular form not of speech but of thought. The former is jargon, very often the instrument, the handmaiden of cant, but by no means its primum mobile or mark of identification. Ultimately indeed jargon is meaninglessness-a circumvention of expressing the idea. As such, it is a puny, neutral, Blifilian, Pecksniffian vice, achieving its mean ends by periphrasis and evasion. Cant, on the other hand, is a positive and aggressive dishonesty, using and discarding its familiar jargon as a lord his underling. Jargon is speech, but cant is thought.

But Nares is right enough in his historical way; he is defining cant, not morally or intellectually, but as a specific and obsolete idiom current only in the Renaissance. The Canting Crew" were an illicit commonwealth which time has ferried over Lethe with all his other second-hand baggage of empires. Ben Jonson and all the artists of his age interpret cant in this confined sense. A passage from "The Staple of Newes":

".. A Rogue,

A very Canter, I, sir,

One that maunds (i.e. begs)

Upon the pad."

Now this constricted application has a certain validity