Their artifices are staringly naked, and have now the effect
of a painted face viewed, after warm hours of dancing, in the morning
light. How could the Lurewells and the Plyants ever have been praised for
ingenuity in wickedness? Critics, apparently sober, and of high
reputation, held up their shallow knaveries for the world to admire.
These Lurewells, Plyants, Pinchwifes, Fondlewifes, Miss Prue, Peggy,
Hoyden, all of them save charming Milamant, are dead as last year's
clothes in a fashionable fine lady's wardrobe, and it must be an
exceptionably abandoned Abigail of our period that would look on them
with the wish to appear in their likeness. Whether the puppet show of
Punch and Judy inspires our street-urchins to have instant recourse to
their fists in a dispute, after the fashion of every one of the actors in
that public entertainment who gets possession of the cudgel, is open to
question: it has been hinted; and angry moralists have traced the
national taste for tales of crime to the smell of blood in our
nursery-songs.
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