Gutzkow wrote three comedies which in point of continued popularity have outlived all his other numerous contributions to the German stage:  Sword and Queue (1843), The Prototype of Tartuffe (1844), and The Royal Lieutenant (1849).  The second of the three has the best motivated plot; the first and third have, by virtue of their national substance, their witty dialogue, and their droll humor, proved dearer to the heart of the German people.  In The Prototype of Tartuffe we are shown President La Roquette at the court of Louis XIV., obliged at last, in spite of his long continued successful efforts to suppress the play, to witness his own public unmasking in the person of Moliere’s Tartuffe, of whom he is the sneaking, hypocritical original.  We hear him in anger declare his readiness to join the Jesuits and we join in the laugh at his discomfiture.  The scene of The Royal Lieutenant, written to celebrate the hundredth recurrence of Goethe’s birthday, is laid in the Seven Years’ War in the house of Goethe’s father in Frankfurt.  The Riccaut-like figure of the Royal Lieutenant himself, Count Thorane, and his outlandish attempts to speak German, the clever portraits of the dignified father and the cheerful mother, and the unhistorical sketch of little Wolfgang, with his pleased and precocious anticipation of his future laurels, are woven by means of witty dialogue into an amusing, though not very coherent or logical whole.  In Gutzkow’s Sword and Queue an entertaining situation at the court of Frederick William I. of Prussia is developed by a very free use of the facts of history, after the manner of the comedy of Scribe.  With rare skill the different characters of the play are sketched and shown upon a background, which corresponds closely enough to historic fact to produce the illusion of reality.  The comedy pilots the Crown Prince’s friend, the Prince of Baireuth, through a maze of intrigue, including Prussian ambition to secure an alliance with England by the marriage of the Princess Wilhelmine to the Prince of Wales; a diplomatic blocking of this plan, with the help of the English Ambassador Hotham; the changed front of the old King, who prefers a union of his daughter with an Austrian Archduke to the hard terms of the proposed English treaty; Hotham’s proposal to the King to bring him a promising recruit for the corps of Royal Grenadiers; the evening of the Tobacco Parliament, in which the Prince of Baireuth feigns tipsiness and in a mocking funeral oration, in honor of the old King, tells the pseudo-deceased some bitter truths,—­to a final scene, in which, as Hotham’s proposed grenadier recruit with Queue and Sword, he wins not only the cordial approval of the King but also the heart and hand of Wilhelmine.