In D’Urfey’s _The Royalist_, an excellent comedy produced at Dorset Garden, 1682 (4to, 1682), the author introduces a certain damsel Philippa, who, disguised as a page, follows the loyal Sir Charles Kinglove with whom she is enamoured. At the end of the second Act her boy’s clothes involve her in the same predicament as befalls Olivia in Act IV of _The Younger Brother_. Although Genest prefers Mrs. Behn’s treatment of the situation, it must, I think, be allowed that D’Urfey has managed the jest with far greater verve and spirit. Honest Tom D’Urfey is in fact one of the least read and most maligned of all our dramatists. He had the merriest comic gifts, and perhaps when the critics and literary historians deign to read his plays he will attain a higher position in our theatrical libraries.
Some critics have suggested that D’Urfey, in his _The Intrigues at Versailles_, produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1697, may have taken a hint from Mrs. Behn’s Mirtilla, and Wycherley’s Olivia (_The Plain Dealer_) for his ‘Madame de Vandosme a right jilt in all humours’, a rôle created by Mrs. Barry. There is indeed some resemblance between all these three characters, base heartless coquettes; and D’Urfey, in making his jilt prefer Sir Blunder Bosse, ‘a dull sordid brute and mongrel, whose humour is to call everybody by clownish names’, to all her other gallants, seems not to have forgotten Mirtilla’s marriage with Sir Morgan Blunder. The very names call attention to the plagiarism. _The Intrigues at Versailles_ is none the less a clever and witty comedy, but a little overcrowded with incident and business.
As sufficiently explained by Gildon, under whose auspices this posthumous play was produced at Drury Lane in 1696, _The Younger Brother; or, The Amorous Jilt_ met with brutal treatment from the audience. There appears to have been a faction, particularly in evidence at its first performance and on the third day, who were steadfastly resolved to damn the comedy, and in spite of fine acting and every advantage it was hissed from the boards. Gildon attributes the failure to ‘the tedious Scenes in Blank Verse betwixt Mirtilla and Prince Frederick’ which he thinks demanded ‘another more easy Dress,’ but, in truth, it can only be attributed to the most verjuiced spite and personal malice. The plot, though somewhat complicated with perhaps a press of crowding incidents, is none the less highly interesting, and the characters are most of them excellently, all well, drawn and sustained. The fact that certain episodes had to be cut in representation in order to bring the comedy within a reasonable time limit, though it may have tended to obscure the connection of the intrigue, could not have insured in spite of its many real merits so absolute a doom for the much maltreated play, a sentence which seems to have wantonly precluded any revival.