With this year, 1726-27, came the first symptom of a "break-up" in the hitherto prosperous condition of Drury Lane. It occurred in the first long and serious illness of Booth, which kept him from the theatre, three long and weary months to the town. The season at Drury Lane, however, and that at Lincoln's Inn Fields, had this alike, that after Booth's welcome return, all London was excited by expectations raised by comedies whose authors were "gentlemen," in whose success the "quality," generally, were especially interested. At Drury it was the "Rival Modes," by Moore Smythe; at Lincoln's Inn Fields, the "Dissembled Wanton, or, my Son, get Money," by Leonard Welsted. In the former piece there is a gay lover, Bellamine (Wilks), wooing the grave Melissa (Mrs. Porter), while the serious Sagely (Mills) pays suit to the sprightly widow Amoret (Mrs. Oldfield). An old beau of King William's time, Earl of Late Airs (Cibber), brings his son to town (Lord Toupet, a modern beau, by Theophilus Cibber), in order that he may marry Melissa, with her father's consent. Amoret contrives to upset this arrangement, and the other lovers are duly united. The plot was good, the players unsurpassable, the two Cibbers fooling it to the top of their bent, and old and new fashions were pleasantly contrasted; but the action was languid, and the piece was hissed.
The incident lacking here, abounded in Welsted's intriguing comedy, the "Dissembled Wanton," a character finely acted by Mrs. Younger[121]--whose marriage with Beaufort (Walker) being forbidden by her father, Lord Severne (Quin), by whom she had been sent to France, she reappears in her father's presence as Sir Harry Truelove, whose real character is known only to Emilia (Mrs. Bullock), Lord Severne's ward. Emilia's intimacy with Sir Harry causes the rupture of her marriage with Colonel Severne, and some coarse scenes have to be got through before all is explained; the respective lovers are united, and Humphrey Staple (Hall) finds it useless to urge his son Toby (W. Bullock) to get money by espousing the rich ward Emilia.
Although Welsted's comedy was lively, it was found to be ill-written. He had had time enough to polish it, for ten years previous to its production Steele had commended the plot, the moral, and the style; he had even praised its decency. Like Moore Smyth's, it could not win the town. The respective authors, who made so much ineffectual noise in their own day, would be unknown to us in this, but for the censure of Pope. In the _Dunciad_ they enjoy notoriety with Theobald, or Cibber, Gildon, Dennis, Centlivre, and Aaron Hill. Moore was an Oxford man, who assumed his maternal grandfather's name--being his heir--and held one or two lucrative posts under Government. His father, the famous Arthur Moore, a wit, a politician, and a statesman, who was long M.P. for Grimsby, had risen, by force of his talents, to an eminent position from a humble station. Pope stooped to call Moore Smyth the son of a footman, and, when the latter name was assumed on his taking his maternal grandfather's estate, the Whigs lampooned him as born at "the paternal seat of his family--the taphouse of the prison-gate, at Monaghan."