You have repealed the acts of Marcus Antonius; you have taken down his laws; you have voted that they were carried by violence, and with a disregard of the auspices; you have called out the levies throughout all Italy; you have pronounced that colleague and ally of all wickedness a public enemy.

In 1740, the old king fell sick, and spoke and acted in his illness with his usual turbulence and roughness, reproaching his physicians, in the grossest terms, with their unskilfulness and impotence, and imputing to their ignorance or wickedness the pain which their prescriptions failed to relieve.

The drama which in the hands of Ben Jonson had attacked folly and wickedness proper to no place or time, descended to the drawing-rooms of the day, and Congreve occupied himself with the portrayal of the social frauds and foolishnesses perpetrated by actual living men and women of fashion in contemporary London.