I may ride the elephant if I please, sir

From a friend who studies gangster films:

"There have been very successful types of art in the past which developed such specific and detailed conventions as almost to make individual examples of the type interchangeable. This is true, for example, of Elizabethan revenge tragedy and Restoration comedy."
--Robert Warshow, "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," 1948.

Then we discussed whether the cinematic gangster could be compared to the rake. Perhaps! Think about it: the desire for singularity, the lust for power, the scorn for social mores...

I'm now trying to write about Etherege's The Man of Mode, one of my two favorite plays in the world (tied with Stoppard's The Invention of Love). Oh, God, it's so good. Not good by the standards of Restoration comedy, but good by the standards of Great Literature. So good I can scarcely bring myself to analyze it. (Last night at dinner, my friend cackled at my announcement that "The Man of Mode is the Übermensch of Restoration comedies.")

Take this exchange between Dorimant, the cynical rake-aesthete, and his friend Young Bellair, the callow romantic. The subject of their gossip is Mrs. Loveit, Dorimant's longtime mistress, whom he is anxious to shake off:

YOUNG BELLAIR. I am confident she loves no man but you.

DORIMANT. The good fortune were enough to make me vain, but that I am in my nature modest.