LIFE
OF
WILLIAM CONGREVE
BY
EDMUND GOSSE, M.A.
CLARK LECTUKEK IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AT TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRILGE.
i/tiI^I
LONDON
WALTER SCOTT, 24 WARWICK LANE
NEW YORK : THOMAS WHITTAKER
TORONTO : W. J. GAGE & CO.
188S
{All rights reserved.)
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Ay
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"(5reat Mriters." /^Aif^
EDITED BY
PROFESSOR ERIC S. ROBERTSON, M.A.
LIFE OF CONGREVE.
CONTENTS,
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
The Congreve family ; William Congreve born at Bardsey,
February lo, 1670 ; removal to Youghal and Lismore ;
goes to Kilkenny, 1681, and to Trinity College, Dublin,
1685 ; begins to write at college ; friendship with Swift ;
returns to England, 1688 ; writes Incognita^ not published
until February 25, 1692 ; account of that novel ; The Old
Bachelor composed in a country garden, 1690 ; entered at
the Middle Temple, March 17, 1691 ; the life in London
coffee-houses ; introduced to Dryden ; the Juvenal and
Persius published October 27, 1692 ; forms the friendship
of Southerne, Hopkins, Maynwaring, Moyle, and other
men of letters ; The Old Bachelor accepted at the Theatre
Royal, and produced, January, 1693, with very great sue-
cess ; characteristics of this comedy ; anecdote of Purcell
and Dennis 13
CHAPTER II.
Congreve's success ; friendship with Montague ; The Double
Dealer produced in November, 1693; characteristics of
that play ; Dryden's eulogy on it ; Swift's epistle to the
6 CONTENTS.
TAGE
author ; Queen Mary's patronage of Congreve ; introduc-
tion to Addison ; theatrical intrigues in London, and
foundation of the Lincoln's Inn Theatre ; Congreve pub-
lishes The Mourning Muse of Alexis, January 28, 1695 ;
Love for Love produced at Easter, 1695 J characteristics
and history of that comedy ; Dennis publishes Letters upon
Several Occasions, containing Congreve's essay on Humour
in Comedy, dated July 10, 1695 ; Congreve is made a
commissioner of hackney coaches ; he publishes the Ode
to the King; produces The Mourning Bride early in 1697 '■>
characteristics and history of that tragedy ; Congreve pub-
lishes 77^^ ^zW/^ ^/^A^ i^«^^, Nov. 18, 1697 . . . 46
CHAPTER HL
The licence of contemporary drama ; the attitude of the clergy ;
signs of impatience among the Puritans and Noncon-
formists ; protests made early in 1698 : those of Merriton
and Blackmore ; Jeremy Collier publishes the Short View
in March, 1698 ; analysis of the contents of that work ;
the sensation it produced ; Gildon replies in the preface to
Phaeton, April, 1698 ; another hand, probably Wycherley's,
follows with A Vindication of the Stage ; replies put forth
by Filmer and by Dennis ; Vanbrugh publishes his Short
Vindication, June 8th ; the Play-houses are prosecuted for
tending to debauchery and profanity ; Congreve at length,
on the 1 2th of July, issues his Amendments in answer to
Collier; this treatise described; the scurrilous pamphlets
it called forth ; The Stage Condemned and The Stage Ac-
quitted ; Collier publishes, on the loth of November, his
Defence of a Short View ; the attitude of Dryden during
the controversy ; the condition of literary society at the
close of the century . 9^
CHAPTER IV.
Depression of the theatres in London ; the Royal Order of
February 18, 1699, directing the actors to modify their
language ; revival of The Double Dealer, March 4, 1699 ;
CONTENTS. 7
PAGE
•production of The Way of the Worlds at Lincoln's Inn
Theatre, March, 1700; partial failure of this play; its
publication, and description of its contents ; death of Dry-
den, May I, 1700 ; Congreve's retirement from public life ;
he goes abroad ; correspondence with Joseph Keally com-
mences ; the masque of The Judgment of Paris is performed
in Dorset Garden, March, 1701 ; Ode for St, Cecilia's Day^
Nov. 22, 1701 ; The Reliquice Gethiniance of 1699 and
1703 described ; Squire Trelooby, adapted by Congreve,
Vanbrugh, and Walsh, is performed at the New Theatre
on the 30th of March, 1704; the history of this farce
obscure; revivals of Love for Love in 1704 and 1705;
Congreve's health continues to fail ; he joins Vanbrugh in
the management of the Haymarket Theatre, April, 1705;
he is made Commissioner of Wine Licences, Dec, 1705 ;
The Tears of Amaryllis published June, 1705 ; death of
Mrs. Arabella Hunt ; the theatrical vicissitudes of the age ;
Congreve publishes A Discourse on Pindaric Ode ; critical
importance of this essay ; ceases to be a Commissioner for
Licencing Hackney Coaches, October 13, 1707 ; publishes
his Works, December, 1710 ; his health gradually declines ;
forms an intimacy with Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough ;
writes his Epistle to Lord Cobham in 1728 ; dies in his
house in Surrey Street on January 19, 1729 ; buried in
Westminster Abbey • . • , . • . • 131
CHAPTER V.
(xongreve's appearance ; Mrs. Manley 's description of him ; his
wit ; the Kit- Cat Club ; Voltaire's visit to Congreve ; his
habits, his friendliness, his collections ; the reputation of
Congreve as a writer ; Lamb's theory of artificial comedy ;
characteristics of Congreve's style ; compared with Ethe-
redge and Wycherley ; final attitude of criticism to his
work .......... 174
APPENDIX 187
INDEX , . 189
PREFATORY NOTE.
THIS is the first time that any attempt has been
made to write a detailed biography of Congreve,
and that circumstance may be held to excuse the intrusion
of what is commonly dispensed with in the volumes of this
series — a lengthy prefatory note. There can be no question
that, unless fresh material should most unexpectedly turn
up, the opportunity for preparing a full and picturesque
life of this poet has wholly passed away. The task
should have been undertaken a hundred and fifty years
ago, when those were still alive who had known him
personally. This occasion was unaccountably allowed to
slip by, partly, no doubt, because the modern art of
biography was but very poorly understood, but partly,
also, because Congreve was no very fascinating or ab-
sorbing human being. Correct biographies of Pope or
Swift were not published until long after the decease of
those writers, yet we have no difficulty whatever in
restoring them to life in fancy. But then they possessed
an interesting personal quality, of which the author of
The Way of the World seems to have been devoid.
In 1730, the year after Congreve's death, that audacious
10 PREFA TOR V J\/0 TE.
pirate Curll issued a volume entitled Memoirs of the
Life, IVrifitigs, and Amours of William Congreve, Esq.
He had the effrontery to invite Mrs. Bracegirdle to con-
tribute facts to it ; in refusing, that admirable actress
predicted that the book would not have " a new sheet "
in it. She might safely have said " a new page." It is
an absolutely worthless construction of scissors and paste,
containing nothing previously unprinted, except one or two
lies, and it is mainly occupied either with reprints of Con-
greve's scattered minor writings or with gossip absolutely
foreign to his career. The name of Charles Wilson
appears on the title of this wretched forgery ; it is under-
stood that there never existed such a person, and it has
been conjectured that it was John Oldmixon, "that
virulent party writer for hire," who was the guilty hack.
The publication of these spurious Memoirs seems to
have dissuaded any honest writer from undertaking in
earnest the task which "Charles Wilson" pretended to
have carried out. At all events, no life of Congreve
has appeared since that date, until the present volume.
The best account of Congreve, published during the age
after his death, is the article by Dr. Campbell in the
Biographica Britannica. Campbell can scarcely have
known Congreve personally, but he was helped by the
aged Southerne, who had been Congreve's friend from
college onwards, and who supplied him with notes. In
later times the known particulars of his life have been
more or less accurately summarized and added to by Dr.
Samuel Johnson, Leigh Hunt, and Macaulay. The
portion of an essay which the last-mentioned writer
-dedicates to Congreve is well known, and is so admir-
PREFATORY NOTE. 11
-able that we regret that Macaulay never returned to treat
Vanbrugh and Farquhar in the same broad and sympa-
thetic spirit. Thackeray's more briUiant essay is much
less accurate than Macaulay's. It must be read for the
pleasure such beautiful imaginative writing gives, but
not as a portrait of the veritable Congreve.
None of these accounts of Congreve, however, extends
beyond the limits of a very few pages, and, extraordinary
as it seems, in these days of research, no one till now has
taken the trouble to examine the existing sources of in-
formation, and collect the facts still discoverable about
the greatest of our comic dramatists. I have not at-
tempted to make a hero of this unromantic, "unre-
proachful " bard ; I shall be satisfied if I have succeeded in
surveying rather minutely a little province of our literary
history which had been neglected, and in so adding my
small contribution to the materials of criticism. Some
fallacies I think I have destroyed ; the theory of Con-
greve's magnificent and preposterous wealth in early life
is shown to be without a basis, and I hope it will be ac-
knowledged that as we know him more intimately he
turns out to be more amiable and much less cynical than
he had been depicted to us. But I am very far from
pretending that he was one of those whom, in the phrase
so persistently and falsely attributed to him, ** to love is
a liberal education."
The story of this book is compiled from materials
scattered over a great many volumes, not all of which are
to be found in any single library. Among the more obvious
sources of information I may mention Gibber, Giles
Jacob, Malone's Dryden, Spence's Anecdotes, Swift's cor-
12 PRE FA TOR V NO TE.
respondence, George Monck Berkeley's curious and valu-
able volume, Luttrel's Diary^ and the newspapers of the
day. I am glad to be able, for the first time, to chronicle
the exact date of the publication of almost all Con-
greve's writings. The bibliography of this poet, crowded
as it mainly is into a short span of years, had hitherto
been entirely neglected ; this is a small matter, perhaps,
but not to be despised in dealing with such masterpieces
as the great comedies of Congreve. I may be allowed
to call attention to the chapter on the Collier contro-
versy. This is the first time in which the pamphlets
which were provoked by that interesting crisis in our
literary ethics have been successively examined and
chronologically arranged.
From the minor and less attainable writings of Congreve
I have occasionally quoted. But I have thought it
needless to pad out the limited space at my disposal
by citing passages from the great comedies, more es-
pecially as the text of these is now at the command of
every reader. Only last year there appeared an excellent
text of Congreve's Plays, in the Mermaid Series
(Vizetelly & Co.), at a low price. To this edition
the Congreve section of Macaulay's Essay was prefixed^
and Mr. A. C. Ewald appended a few valuable notes.
LIFE OF CONGREVE.
CHAPTER I.
OF all the important men of letters born after the
Restoration, the earliest to distinguish himself was
William Congreve, and with him, in a certain sense, the
literature of the eighteenth century began. He was the
most eminent poet between Dryden and Pope, and he
formed the advanced guard of the army of the Age of
Anne. Like other writers of his time — like Gay, for
instance, and Steele — he lost count of his years, and
thought, or affected to think, that he was younger than
we know him to have been. In contradiction to the
general impression of his friends, however, he maintained
that the event took place in England, not in Ireland ;
he was right, but this fact was not proved until the close
of last century. Theophilus Gibber, and others following
him, have asserted that Sir James Ware reckoned Gon-
greve among writers born in Ireland, on evidence received
from Southerne. There is some mystification here, for Sir
James Ware died before our poet was born, and the en-
larged edition of his book, published long afterwards by
Walter Harris, gives no authority of Southerne's for in-
14 LIFE OF
eluding Congreve among Irish worthies. It seems
indubitable that Congreve thought that he was not born
until 1672, and early biographers, with more evidence
before them than we possess, may have discovered that,
by that time, the Congreve family had migrated ta
Youghal.
The family of the poet was ancient and of high repute.
It took its name from Congreve, a hamlet one mile south-
west of the town of Pentridge, in the west of Stafford-
shire. At Stretton Hall, a mile or two further in the
country, in the midst of land which is still agricultural,
the Congreves had resided since the beginning of the
fourteenth century. Richard Congreve, the poet's
grandfather, had been one of the thirteen veteran
cavaliers destined by Charles II. for the order of the
Royal Oak, if that design had ever been completed.
His second son, William Congreve, is said to have married
Anne, daughter of Sir Thomas, and granddaughter of
the famous Sir Anthony Fitzherbert. But in 1670 Sir
Anthony had been dead more than one hundred and
thirty years, so that there is obviously here some mistake,
and other authorities say that the poet's mother bore the
maiden name of Browning. The Fitzherberts were a
very extensive Staffordshire family, and both stories may
be partly true ; or Anne may have been the wife of
Richard, not of William. The poet was born at Bardsey,
near Leeds, in the house of his maternal great-uncle. Sir
John Lewis. His baptism was entered in the parish
register of Bardsey, where it was discovered by Malone,
under the date February 10, 1669 [1670].
William Congreve the elder was an officer in the army,.
CONGREVE. 15
and during the infancy of the poet he removed, with his-
family, to command the garrison of the town of Youghal,
in Ireland. According to Southerne, he resigned this
office after three years, to become agent for the estates of
the Earl of Cork, and thenceforward resided at Lismore, as
the centre of the Burlington interests. ' But in 1685 we
find him still described as *' de Yogholia." It was /
probably in the year 1681 that the younger William
Congreve proceeded to the Eton of Ireland, Kilkenny^
where one of his schoolfellows was Jonathan Swift, three
years his senior. It may be questioned whether the
friendship that existed throughout the life of Congreve
between these two great men began at school or at
college, since Swift left Kilkenny as early as April 24^
1682. It is, however, distinctly stated that Congreve
"received the first tincture of letters at the great school
of Kilkenny." He was noted as a boy of talent. "While
at school he gave several instances of his genius for
poetry ; but the most peculiar one was a very pretty copy
of verses which he made upon the Death of his Master's
Magpie." These have not survived, and the earliest
verses of his which we possess are the " Ah ! whither,
whither shall I fly ! " attributed to 1687. His tutor at
Kilkenny was Dr. Hinton.
On thesth of April, 1685, Congreve proceeded to Trinity \
College, Dublin, where his tutor was St. George Ashe, '
the eminent mathematician. This distinguished man,
then quite young, and but recently elected to a fellowship,
is remembered less from the fact that he afterwards
adorned three successive Irish dioceses, than from his
intimacy with Swift, whom he is said, long afterwards, to
16 LIFE OF
have secretly married to Stella. Congreve's college
record was probably a better one than Swift's, for he not
only became a fme scholar, but, according to Southerne,
enjoyed that reputation at Trinity. He was certainly not
less attracted by the rumours of poetical, and especially
dramatic, fame left behind them or sent backward in
reverberation by various graduates slightly senior to him-
self, especially Nahum Tate and Thomas Southerne. At
all events, in spite of the " somebody tells us " of Leigh
Hunt, Congreve and Swift were certainly together, as the
register of the college testifies, under the literature-loving
Ur. Ashe. If the early report that Incognita was
written in a fortnight, at the age of seventeen, be correct,
this novel was a product of the poet's last year at college.
At the close of 1688, like Swift, and possibly in his
company, Congreve hastened into England at the desire
of his father, Ireland being now, after the Revolution, no
place where a gentleman whose family had served the
Stuarts could feel comfortable or hope for promotion.
Before accompanying Congreve across the channel we
may briefly chronicle the fate of his first work. The
original edition of Incognita : or^ Love and Duty Reconciled
appears to be extremely rare. As a matter of fact I have
been able to trace but one copy of it, that in the Bod-
leian.^ It was licensed December 22, 1691, and pub-
lished, according to an advertisement in the London
Gazette^ on the 25th of February, 1692. Incognita seems
to have enjoyed considerable popularity. It was in-
* Incognita : or, Love and Duty Reconciled. A Novel.
Printed for Peter Buck, at the Sign of the Temple, near Temple Bar
in Fleet Street, 1692.
CONGREVE. 17
eluded by the publisher, R. Wellington, in a series of
cheap reprints of novels, which he issued in 1 700. This
had neither Congreve's name upon it, nor the pseudonym
Cleophil which signed the original issue, and it was
equally without preface or dedication. In the Dyce and
Forster Libraries two separate editions of 17 13 contain
all of these. There were probably several other issues of
Incpgnita^ besides the reprint of 1730. That an edition
of an anonymous novel of the end of the seventeenth
century should have disappeared is no matter for sur-
prise. This class of literature was treated with marked
disdain, and having been read to pieces by the women,
was thrown into the fire. If the novels of the great Mrs.
Behn had not been collected, many of them would now
scarcely be known to exist, and the British Museum has
not, hitherto, been able to secure any edition of them all
earlier than the fifth.
In a courtly dedication to Mrs. Katherine Leveson,
the author of Incognita shows himself already an adept
in that elegant and elaborate persiflage which later on
became a second nature to him : —
.-Since I have drawn my pen (he says) at a Recontro, I think it
better to engage, where, though there be still enough to disarm me,
there is too much generosity to wound ; for so shall I have the
saving reputation of an unsuccessful courage, if I can't make it a
drawn battle. But methinks the comparison intimates something
of a defiance, and savours of arrogance, wherefore, since I am con-
scious to myself of a fear which I can't put off, let me use the policy
of cowards, and lay this novel, unarm'd, naked and shivering, at
your feet, so that if it should want merit to challenge protection, yet,
as an object of charity, it may move compassion.
It is impossible for the present writer to agree with the
18 LIFE OF
critics who have passed over this novel in contemptuous
silence or with a word of dispraise. It is a slight and
immature production, no doubt, but it is far from being
without merit, and in relation to Congreve's subsequent
dramatic work it deserves a close examination. In 1691
rvlrs. Aphra Behn had passed away, and no praise is due
to Cleophil for having followed her in substituting the short
novel of intrigue for the long-winded and interminable
romance of the Scudery and Calprenede School. But it
is noticeable that while the latter was still in full favour
with the public, Congreve saw the ridiculous side of a
fashion which could not prepare its readers in less than
ten enormous volumes for the nuptials of the illustrious
Aronce and the admirable Clelie. He says : —
Romances are generally composed of the constant loves and in-
vincible courages of heroes, heroines, kings and queens, mortals of
the first rank, and so forth ; where lofty language, miraculous con-
tingencies, and impossible performances, elevate and surprise the
reader into a giddy delight, which leaves him flat upon the ground
wherever he leaves off, and vexes him to think how he has suffered
himself to be pleased and transported, concerned and afflicted at . . .
knights' success, and damsels' misfortunes, and such like, when he
is forced to be very well convinced that 'tis all a lie.
He argues against the adoption of so bewildering a style
of fiction, and is all in favour of such realism in novel-
writing as "not being wholly unusual or unprecedented
may, by not being so distant from our belief, bring also
the pleasure nearer to us." This, the best stories of
Mrs. Behn, with all their obvious faults, did strive to do,
pointing with a trembling hand towards the downright
forgeries of real life to be introduced in the next genera-
CONG RE VE. 19
tion by Defoe. The interest of Incognita^ however, lies
for us, not in its artificial and but faintly entertaining
story, but in the instinctive art by which the author, a
dramatist to the finger-tips, has seized and elaborated
those parts of the story only which bear a theatrical
interpretation, and has made his book less a novel than
a scenario. He introduces his personages only when
they can be confronted as if upon the stage, and is mainly
concerned to preserve " the unity of contrivance."
As Incognita has long ceased to be easily accessible,
some outline of its contents may here be permitted.
According to a writer in the Biographia Britannica^ the
events described, although the action is laid in Italy,
took place in England; this seems very improbable, how-
ever, and if Congreve had taken the trouble to write a
rojjiati ct clef, some gossip, we may be sure, would have
preserved the key. Any one who chooses may, if he
likes, see Swift in the Hippolito and Congreve himself in
the Aurelian of this probable tale. Aurelianand Hippo-
lito, a young gentleman for whom he had contracted an
intimate friendship, are educated together in Sienna ; at
the command of Aurelian's father, both proceed to
Florence to improve their studies, Florence being the
home of the old man in question. On arriving the youths
discover that a court ball is arranged for the same even-
ing, and accordingly they determine not to report them-
selves, but to attend that night at the palace in disguise.
By the help of their servants they procure splendid cos-
tumes for the evening, but Hippolito has to put up with
the dress of a certain cavalier of fashion who happens to
be ill in bed. At the ball, of course, each of the young
20 LIFE OF
men falls violently in love with a mask, and the sallies
and rallies of their courteous impertinence read exactly-
like what we should expect in the first lispings of a comic
dramatist. Here is a specimen : —
This raillery awakened the cavalier from the agreeable reverie he
was fallen into.
" 'Tis true, madam ! " cried he, " but as you justly observed, the
invention may be foreign to the person who puts it in practice ; and,
as well as I love a good dress, I should be loath to answer for the
wit of all around us."
"I hope then," returned the lady, "you are convinced of your
error, since 'tis impossible to say who in all this assembly made
choice of their own fancy or their friends ? "
"Not in the least," said he, "I dare engage that lady who is
playing with the tassels of her girdle, though she is agreeably
dressed, does not know it."
" You are not mistaken in your guess," cried she, smiling, "for I
assure you that lady knows as little as any in the room — except my-
self."
"Ah ! madam," said Aurelian, " you know everything save your
own perfections, and those only you will not know, as 'tis the height
of human wisdom to seem ignorant of them."
" How ? " cried the lady, " I thought the knowledge of one's self
had most justly deserved that character?"
Aurelian was a little at a loss how to recover the blander, when
the music coming in, luckily for him put a stop to the discourse.
Hippolito enjoys a more instant, but a more embarras-
sing conquest than Aurelian, for the lady he addresses,
imagining him to be the gentleman whose costume he is
wearing, warns him of his Ciivtreme rashness in appearing
in that assembly, and urges him to follow her to a place
of safety, which he does, but leaves her undiscovered,
having secured her handkerchief. Aurelian, in his turn^
COiXGRE VE. 21
not venturing to mention his own name, which was well
known in Florence, calls himself Hippolito to the mask
with whom he dances, while the real Hippolito can think
of no better pseudonym for himself than Aurelian. Next
day, in suits of silver armour enamelled with azure, the
two young strangers, with their vizors down, tilt in the
lists before the Duke, and, of course, win the honours
of the field from the most gallant Florentines. Aurelian's
lady, who calls herself Incognita, and who is really the
fair Juliana, a lady of fortune whom Aurelian's father
designs for his son's bride, follows them disguised to their
lodgings ; they are absent, but she finds a variety of other
persons whom she is not seeking, as on the ordinary
comic stage of the Restoration. Aurelian has an awful
scene, meanwhile, in a churchyard, by night, with an
assassin, and Hippolito gets into an apparently hopeless
tangle of intrigue through being, by his own fault, mis-
taken for Aurelian. After a great many scenes, in which
the prose dialogue totters on the very brink of such blank
verse as Crowne and Settle boasted, the web is loosened
and all the threads are drawn out. Each of the young
men approaches the old gentleman on his knee, and
receives the hand of the lady whom he desires, who
turns out also to be his predestined bride, and so love
and duty are reconciled. It would not make at all a
bad little play, and some of the scenes are prettily
described. More than this even a biographer dares not
say in praise of Cleophil's Incognita.
There is reason to suppose that for the first two years
after his leaving college, Congreve remained in Stafford-
shire with his relations. Probably the whole family
22 LIFE OF
returned to England, since the elder William Congreve,
who had been described as " de Yogholia," in 1685, and
of Lismore a little later, is once more " de Stratton in
com. Staffordiae," in 1691. Legend says that The Old
Bachelor was written, some years before it was acted, in
a garden. We shall not be far wrong if we conjecture
that the date of its composition was the summer or
early autumn of 1690. Congreve, who very rarely speaks
of himself, gives us a precious fragment of autobiography
while defending The Old Bachelor in the Amendments of
1698. He says, referring to Collier's attacks : —
I cannot hold laughing when I compare his dreadful comment
with such poor silly words as are in the text, especially when I reflect
how young a beginner and how very much a boy I was when that
Comedy was written, which several know was some years before it
was acted. When I wrote it I had little thoughts of the stage, but
did it to amuse myself in a slow recovery from a fit of sickness.
Afterwards, through my indiscretion it was seen, and in some little
time more it was acted.
Two beautiful manorial gardens dispute the honour of
being the birth-place of The Old Bachelor^ that of Stratton
Hall, and that of Aldermaston, in Berkshire. It may
be that the indisposition the poet describes was serious
and lingering ; at all events, it was not until the subse-
quent winter had past that he made his start in life,
arriving in London at the age of twenty-one. The
Register of the IMiddle Temple notes the occurrence as
follows : —
Marte lymo. i69or9i]. Mr. Wilmus. Congreve, filius et heres
apparens Wilmi. Congreve de Stratton in com. Staffordice, Ar.
admissus est in societatem Medii Temph, i^pecialiter.
CONGREVE. 23
Congreve was not fitted for the plodding life of a pro-
fessional man. His father, it is evident, had now
inherited the family estates, and the young man's allow-
ance was probably ample. " But the severe study of the
law had so little relation to the active disposition and
sprightly humour of the young gentleman, that though
he continued for three or four years," that is to say, no
doubt, until his civil-service appointment in July, 1695,
" to live in chambers, and pass for a Templar, yet it does
not appear that he ever applied himself with diligence to
conquer his dislike to a course of life, which had been
chosen for him with so little respect either to the turn
of his natural parts or the preceding course of his educa-
tion." The same contemporary evidence, however,
asserts that he eagerly and industriously gave himself to
a preparation for the literary life.
Between March, 1691, when he arrives, probably alone,
in London, and August, 1692, when he is already an
accepted poet and the friend of Dryden, there is a period
of nearly a year and a half during which we see nothing
of Congreve. He quickly took his place, we know, with
that elegant adroitness which was his characteristic, in
the frivolous London of William and Mary, that nucleus
of the "Town" which revolved about the Court, which
haunted the Park and the Play-house, and which lived
mainly in the Coffee-houses. The Revolution had
brought with it much less change of manners than might
have been expected. Under the sullen patronage of
James H., it is true, the fashions and politer arts had
somewhat languished. But in 1690, when the turmoil of
the change of dynasty had ceased, there came a reaction
24 LIFE OF
to the temper of Charles II. The Sir Foplings and Sir
Courtlys, who had disappeared in the cast wind of the
ascetic days of James, began to sun themselves in the
Mall again, the same delicious creatures, with their long
fair wigs, and the creve-coiur locks curling on the napes of
their soft necks, with their scarlet heels, and clouded
canes, and laced handkerchiefs breathing the I\Iontpellier
essence or perfume of millefleur water, their gold boxes
oi pasiiilios in their hands, their elderly faces painted
young with Spanish red and white ceruse, and the frangi-
pan exhaling from the chicken-skin gloves upon their
plump white hands. These were the Beaux, the pink of
French affectation, the great heroic figures of the comedy
of their age.
These were the heroes for whom life provided no loftier
duty or more harassing care than the ^t conduct of a
spruce cravat-string or the judicious careening of a peri-
vvig. Noble creatures they were, scarcely willing to sub-
mit, in hurrying to an appointment, to allow their clothes
to be pressed into " the scandal of a small sedan." They
were the first objects of a playwright's study, and an
Etheredge or a Crowne might rarely get any further.
But Congreve was to fill his various stage with a multi-
tude of other figures, personages made, no doubt, to
circle around the central group of tyrant-beaux, but, in
their own way, to be no less living and vivid. For this
wider study of the comic side of life the Coffee-houses
offered an extraordinary wealth of opportunity. Flere
men of all sorts met in the forenoon, and again, after the
play, in the early evening, to talk, to discuss politics, to
hear the last new thing. Here auctions were held;
CONGREVE. 25
hitlier came those who had lost such a valuable possession
as " a small black groom, pock-marked, last seen in dark-
red small-clothes ;" those who were carrying on a clandes-
tine correspondence which might not be pursued in their
own house or lodgings. This hurly-burly, where courtiers,
quacks, soldiers, knights, poets^ and mountebanks, formed
" a hotch-potch of society," was the representative of the
modern club, without its restrictions and with five times
its vivacity. The age, especially in London, was less
domestic, had less of the snug ease of " home " and its
familiar pleasures, than any before or since in England.
The foreign habit of living in the cafe and the restaitrani
had been adopted in deliberate rejection of the Puritan
home with its fireside-hearth, and this exotic fashion had
not yet begun to lose its popularity.
A rare poem. The School of Politicks, published in 1690,
gives a curious account of the humours of the Coffee-
house as Congreve must have found them when he
arrived in town. The company met to drink claret or a
dish of tea : —
The murmuring buzz which through the room was sent
Did bee-hives' noise exactly represent,
And like a bee-hive, too, 'twas filled, and thick,
All tasting of the Honey Politick
Called " news," which they all greedily sucked in.
The Coffee-house presented the ideal of good company,
and without a modern snobishness, for, as has already
been said, all classes of men who could pay, and who
would behave decently, were admitted. The anonymous
Pindaric bard just quoted proceeds : —
26 LIFE OF
More various scenes of humour I might tell
Which in my little stay befell ;
Such as grave wits, who, spending farthings four,
Sit, smoke, and warm themselves an hour ;
Or modish town-sparks, drinking chocolate,
With beaver cocked, and laughing loud,
To be thought wits among the crowd.
Or sipping tea, while they relate
Their evening's frolic at the Rose.
This was the field, we cannot doubt, in which Congreve
learned his art, whence he could conjure up the variegated
mob that crowds his stage, where he listened to a whisper
of that wit and intellectual passion which thrill his
polished and artificial characters.
Congreve made his start in literary life — for the
Incognita was scarcely a dclnit — under the majestic
auspices of Dryden. The young poet has a prominent
place, and is introduced without apology, in the Juvenal
and Persius of 1693. This book, a handsome folio, was
ready for the press on the i8th of August, 1692, and,
according to the London Gazette^ in spite of the date on
its title-page, was published on the 27th of October in
that year. No better opportunity for making a public
appearance could be conceived. This was, perhaps, the
most important publication of 1692, and it was one in
which Congreve found himself associated with the first
poet of the age, and with a group of tlie most dis-
tinguished living scholars. Moreover, a thirst for poetical
translations of the classics was now very keen with the
public, who had, ten years before, welcomed Creech's
Lucretius^ and had been spurring Dryden on to further
triumphs in the direction of Horace and Virgil. Every-
CONG REV E. 27
thing was combined to give the young poet a fair oppor-
tunity of displaying his powers of verse and scholarship.
In the course of the seventeenth century, two indus-
trious writers, Stapylton and Barton Holiday, had succes-
sively presented the world with English versions of
Juvenal, which kept tolerably close to the original, but
which lacked all the poetic graces. Oldham, that Mar-
cellus of our satire, whom Dryden loved and had
melodiously lamented, found Juvenal particularly con-
genial to his own profuse and violent genius, and para-
phrased the third and thirteenth satires picturesquely and
loosely. The version in which Congreve now took part
was proposed and edited by Dryden, who had become
very social in his old age, and loved to collect the young
poets round him. Of the sixteen satires he undertook
five himself, gave two to Nahum Tate, one to Creech, one
to each of his own sons, one to young George Stepney,
of Trinity College, Cambridge, and divided the rest
among less -known writers. Congreve received the
eleventh as his share. On the w^hole the performance,
though the work of eleven men, is very uniform in quality,
Dryden being easily and usually happiest in phrase as
well as in verse. Prefixed to the collection is one of the
latest, and certainly one of the fullest and most valuable
of Dryden's critical essays, alone enough to give perma-
nent value to the volume. This is dedicated, in a too
fulsome strain of eulogy, to the satiric poet the Earl of
Dorset, then Lord Chamberlain. Dorset was a man of
uncommon talent, "the best good man with the worst-
natured Muse," an easy-going creature of the most
indulgent order, who amused himself, in literature, by
28 LIFE OF
pouring forth none but waspish sentiments. Dorset,
who still holds some small place among the minor Eng-
lish poets, read, let us hope with a blush, that the greatest
commendation Dryden's own partiality ever gave the best
of his own pieces was that they were imitations of Dorset's.
In a less painfully obsequious spirit Dryden presents to
the Maecenas of the day his fellow-labourers ; "some of
them," he says, " have the honour to be known to your
Lordship already, and they who have not yet that happi-
ness desire it now." Congreve, no doubt, was one of
the latter class.
The Eleventh Satire is not one which we should select
for special praise if all were anonymous, yet Congreve
has done his work well. He is a little too copious in his
paraphrase ; he extends the 208 lines of Juvenal to
nearly double that number. But in this he is not a
greater sinner than his colleagues, and perhaps the entire
sense of one of Juvenal's dense and full-bodied lines
could not be rendered in less than a couplet. This is
hov/ Congreve translates the prettiest passage in this
satire, the description *of the vienu which Persicus must
expect.
Be not surprised that 'tis all homely cheer,
For nothing from the shambles I provide,
But from my own small farm, the tenderest kid
And fattest of my flock, a suckling yet.
That ne'er had nourishment but from the teat.
No bitter willow-tops have been its food,
Scarce grass ; its veins have more of milk than blood.
Next that, shall mountain sparagus be laid,
Pulled by some plain but cleanly country -maid ;
The largest eggs, yet warm within the nest,
CONGREVE. 29
Together with tlie hens that laid them, dressed ;
Clusters of grapes, preserved for half a year,
Which, plump and fresh as on the vine, appear ;
Apples of a rich flavour, fresh and fair,
Mixed with the Syrian and the Signian pear, —
Mellowed by winter from their cruder juice,
Light of digestion now, and fit for use.
At the close of the Juvenal, with a new title-page and
pagination, come The Satires of Aldus Per sins Flaccus.
In this province Dryden reigns alone, having travelled
unassisted through the six dark and thorny poems. But
here we find Congreve, though quite unknown to the
world, exalted above all his colleagues. The only com-
plimentary poem affixed to the Persius is his, and this is
the earhest of his notable publications. It is a fine poem
of compliment from "the youngest to the oldest singer"
of the age, celebrating Dryden as the heroic knight who
has freed the captive Persius from the magic enchant-
ment of his own obscurity, and who deserves the title of
" great Revealer of dark Poesie." The whole poem is
eloquent, inspired by genuine intellectual passion, the
critical passion of the scholar and lover of literature,
without expression of personal feeling or humanity of
any kind, and in its dry light of wit and inteUigence
reveals the Congreve that we presently learn to respect
and admire, but never really learn to know. He sums
up his critical encomium thus : —
So stubborn flints their inward heat conceal,
Till art and force the unwilling sparks reveal,
But, through your skill, from these small seeds of fire.
Bright flames arise, which never can expire.
30 LIFE OF
In an age when even the grossness of comphment was
apt to fail in pleasing, this was praise given with tact, for
such a result was precisely that whicli Dryden had hoped
for. He had but little respect for the " scabrous and
hobbling '' muse of Persius, and was ready to be assured
that his translation formed a much better poem than the
original. Congreve did wisely, in praising Dryden, to
emphasise his wonder that so bright a flower of poesy
should spring from so poor a Latin seed.
The young Staffordshire poet had achieved a signal
success in winning the affection of Dryden, to whom, it
v^'ould appear, he had lately been presented. At this
time Dryden was at the height of his fame. He had
outlived the troubles of his early career; his enemies had
fallen away, and had left him calm. The wicked Earl of
Rochester was dead, and Shadwell was dying ; ]\Iul grave
had become a friend and Crowne was cowed and pacified;
such insects as Elkanah Settle had had their day, had
stung and had fallen. At length the great and weary
Dryden was at rest, and in the time of his fame and his
success, he had developed a noble magnanimity. He
was by far the most eminent living English writer, and
he w^ho had fought so hard all through his youth and
middle life was fighting still, but no longer with his
fellow-artists. He had become a sort of good giant,
and he amused himself, in his conscious kingship, by
looking round to find some one to reign in poetry after
him. Ten years earlier he thought he had found a
successor in Oldham, but that promising young poet
died on the threshold of his career. There is evidence
to show that Dryden immediately and finally concluded
CONGREVE. 31
that this young William Congreve, with his one un-
polished play in his pocket, was the coming man, and
he expended his confidence and his aftection upon him
at once.
The person who introduced the obscure young Templar
to the court of Dryden is understood to have been
Captain^Thomas Southerne. This man had enjoyed
his momentary triumph as a possible coming poet,
but although he had ushered in the school of Orange
dramatists, he did not attempt to retain a position
which was hardly suited to his very respectable powers.
He was an Irishman, and a graduate of Trinity
College, but he had left Dubhn before Congreve
came from school. His first plays, a tragedy and a
comedy, had enjoyed more success than they properly
deserved. Southerne had yet to learn his art. He
was taken away from the theatre to serve in the army,
and rose to the grade of captain before the Revolu-
tion. AVhen Congreve arrived in London, Southerne
w^as just making a second start in theatrical life. There
were few greater successes than his Sir Anthony Love
enjoyed in 1691, and The Wives' Excuse in 1692 was
almost more lucky, for though the public slighted it, the
literary world, with Dryden at its head, indignantly
applauded. Dryden wTote a consolatory epistle to
Southerne, in which he advised him to write another
comedy : —
The standard of thy style let Etheredge be ;
For wit, the immortal spring of Wycherley ;
Learn after both to draw some just design,
And the next age will learn to copy thine.
32 LIFE OF
This was too large an order for Southerne to carry out,
but we might fancy that he passed it on to his young
friend Congreve. Southerne presently found his true
vocation in a sentimental species of tragedy, founded
upon Otway.
We learn from an expression of Gibber's that Southerne
was by this time a sort of reader for the stage ; and
Congreve may have introduced himself to him in this
capacity, with the MS. of The Old Bachelor in his hand ;
or the common training at Dublin may have brought
them together at once. Southerne was ever afterwards
on an intimate footing with Congreve, and forty years
later supplied information, unfortunately of a partly
incorrect character, regarding the early hfe of the latter.
Other friends who are mentioned among those who early
saw the merit of Congreve, and helped to recommend
him to the notice of Dryden, are Walter Moyle and
Arthur Maynwaring. Moyle was a brilliant Oxford man,
a little younger than Congreve, and, like him, a Templar.
Nothing that Moyle has left behind him can be said to
justify the very high opinion of his contemporaries.
Dryden spoke of " that learning and judgment, above
his age, which every one discovers in Mr. Moyle."
Before the close of the century he entered Parliament
as member for Saltash, in his native county of Cornwall,
and faded away out of literary society. His JVorks,
pompously edited in 1727, consist of political tracts and
translations from Greek prose; and he is remembered
only in connection with Congreve.
Another truncated reputation is that of Arthur Mayn-
waring, who had personally interviewed the great Boileau,
CONGREVE. 33
and was supposed to have imbibed poetical wisdom from
under that mighty periwig. He also was a Templar,
and he had led olif with an anonymous satire so vigorously
turned that the town had taken it for Dryden's. As
alike the protege of Congreve's father's patron, Lord
Burlington, and of the English Maecenas, Lord Dorset,
Maynwaring was probably instrumental in launching
Congreve on the polite world. It is particularly stated
that he was engaged in 1692, in company with Southerne
and Dryden, on the preparation of The Old Bachelor for
the stage, and that he even revised it. We shall occa-
sionally meet with the name of Maynwaring in this
history, although, like Moyle, he abandoned literature
for pohtics, and became a court-journalist and member
of Parliament. He died prematurely in the year 17 12.
He was a man of fine judgment, brilliant conversation,
and unsullied honour — asserting, in a corrupt age, the
value of an absolute purity in official life.
In the company of these friends, but under what exact
circumstances we shall never know, the comedy which
Congreve had brought with him in his pocket from the
country was gradually polished for the stage. As early
as the summer of 1692, The Old Bachelor \N2iS not merely
accepted at the Theatre Royal, but Thomas Davenant,
the manager of that house, gave Congreve, six months
before the performance of his piece, the then unpre-
cedented privilege, to a new writer, of a free entrance to
the theatre. Southerne records that when he showed
the MS. to Dryden, that poet declared that " he never
saw such a first play in his life, and that the author not
being acquainted with the stage or the town, it would be
3
34 LIFE OF
a pity to have it miscarry for want of a little assistance ;
the stuff was rich indeed, only the fashionable cut was
wanting." Southerne, Maynwaring, and Dryden united
to add this last polish, and Congreve wisely let them do
with his play what they would. These critics were loud
in their commendations, and the young poet's vanity
would have been sickly indeed, if he had not welcomed
the aid which their superior knowledge of theatrical
affairs afforded him.
! The moment was a very trying one in the history of the
stage, and when The Old Bachelor was finally produced in
January, 1693, the actors at Theatre Royal needed the best
play they could get, and the most favourable opinions, to
enable them to make way against the unparalleled mis-
fortunes of that winter. The month of December had
deprived the company of three of those actors to whom,
after Betterton, it mainly looked for support. On the
9th of December, 1692, the amiable and gifted William
Mountfort, the most graceful and impassioned actor of
young lovers' parts which the stage then possessed, was
murdered in Norfolk Street, Strand, by Lord Mohun and
Captain Hill, mainly, it would seem, because of the fire
which he threw into his scenes with the beautiful Mrs.
Bracegirdle, of whom those turbulent bloods had the
impertinence to be enamoured. Within a week after
this tragical event — although, this time, from natural
causes — the unexpected deaths of two other leading
actors, Nokes and Leigh, shocked the town. Nokes had
been the most farcical of comedians, Leigh the most
fantastic ; and their loss left a terrible gap in the ranks
of the Theatre Royal. In reading The Old Bachelor^ we
COXGREVE. a5
are not permitted to doubt that the part of Fondlewife
was adapted, in some of its special touches, to Leigh,
and that of Sir Joseph Wittol to Nokes ; while Vain-
love was cut out with equal obviousness for Mountfort.
These unfortunate losses gave opportunity, however, for
young and ambitious actors to rise to stronger characters
than had yet been allotted to them ; and, in particular,
the Irish actor, Thomas Doggett, who had waited until
then for promotion, was allowed to take the critical part
of Fondlewife.
The curtain rose, and an amusing prologue was spoken
by Mrs. Bracegirdle, who pretended to break down and
forget her part, and finally to run away, without ever
deviating from excellent heroic verse. The first act tried
the endurance of the public, and proved its intellectual
temper. There was no movement at all ; the entire act
consisted of conversation between four gentlemen in a
London street, nor did there appear in the conduct
of the story, as so far sketched, any freshness of invention
or advance upon the comic types of Wycherley. But
the wit, the sparkle, the delicate finish of the dialogue
were something, till that night, unparalleled on the
British stage. The language — as IMacaulay puts it — was
"resplendent with wit and eloquence." From all its
facets the sharply-cut dialogue flashed the pure light of
the diamond, and the audience, a little bewildered at
first, sat amazed and respectful. When the great
Betterton (in the part of Heartwell, the surly Old
Bachelor himself) appeared on the stage, and supported
Powell (as Bellmour), with his prestige and the magical
melody of his voice, the success of the play was assured.
36' LIFE OF
But the first act passed, and the first scene of the
second act, without the appearance of a single actress.
In this whetting of the popular expectation, however^
there was a signal artifice, for as a point of fact all the
female beauty and talent of the English stage were col-
lected behind the scenes, ready to be introduced. Even
the fair and comical Mrs. Mountfort, though her murdered
husband was scarcely at rest in his grave, was required
to take the difficult part of Belinda. By far the most
pleasing figure in TJie Old Bachelor, and its only entirely
innocent and virtuous character, is Araminta, whose hand
is at last wasted upon the worthless Vainlove. For this
part only one woman on the London stage could be
thought of, namely Anne Bracegirdle, then in her
thirtieth year and at the zenith of her charms. To Airs.
Bracegirdle this first performance of The Old Bachelor
was destined to prove a momentous affair ; the current
of her life was permanently altered by it. So large a part
does this illustrious and admirable woman take in the
life of Congreve, that this seems the place to introduce
her more completely in the eloquent words of Colley
Gibber :—
Mrs. Bracegirdle was now [1690 or 1691] but just blooming to
her maturity ; her reputation as an actress gradually rising with
that of her person ; never any woman was in such general favour
of her spectators, which, to the last scene of her dramatic life, she
maintained by not being unguarded in her private character. This
discretion contributed not a little to make her the cava, the darling
of the theatre ; for it will be no extravagant thing to say, scarce an
audience saw her that were less than half of them lovers, without a
suspected favourite among them ; and though she might be said to
have been the universal passion, and under the strongest tempta-
COXGREVE. 87
tions, her constancy in resisting them served but to increase the
number of her admirers, and this perhaps you will more easily
believe when I extend not my encomiums on her person beyond a
sincerity that can be suspected ; for she had no greater claim to
beauty than what the most desirable brunette might pretend to.
But her youth and lively aspect threw out such a glow of health
and cheerfulness that on the stage few spectators, that were not
past it, could behold her without desire. It was even a fashion
among the gay and young to have a taste or tcudrc for Mrs. Brace-
girdle.
According to the universal tradition of the age, this
cold and discreet actress deviated from the path of dis-
cretion, if ever, only or alrnost only in favour of Con-
greve, for whom, at all events, to the day of his death,
she preserved a close and affectionate friendship. It was
for her that in every instance Congreve wrote the leading
parts in his dramas, and he seems to have indulged his
own feeling for the actress by invariably making her i
play the part of an admired and courted queen of beauty. :
It was Doggett's acting of the ludicrous part of Fondle-
wife, the Puritan banker, which finally and completely
conquered the house. The fourth and fifth acts,
although the weakness of the latter is very obvious to
the reader of The Old Bachelor, went in a splendid popular
triumph. Davies says, in his Dramatic Miscellanies, that
when Mrs. Barry, Mrs. Bracegirdle, Mrs. Mountfort,
and ^Irs. Bowman appeared together on the stage at the
end, the audience fervently applauded the galaxy of their
beauty. No doubt the fact is correct, except in one par-
ticular ; Mrs. Barry had nothing to do on the stage in
the last scene. She acted Letitia Fondlewife ; but if we
replace Mrs. Barry by jNIrs. Leigh, the quartet is again
38 LIFE OF
complete. ]^.Irs. Barry, who had but Htile scope for her
peculiar dignity of bearing in the character of Letitia,
was rewarded by speaking the epilogue. Congreve was
always very adroit in the stage-distribution of his
pieces.
The Old Bachelor ran for fourteen nights, an extraor-
dinary success in those days. It was no less successful
as a book ; on the 23rd of March a third edition was
published, and it continued to be reprinted. The
original issue was dedicated to Lord Cliftbrd, the eldest
son of the Earl of Burlington, of whose Irish estates
Colonel Congreve, the poet's father, had been manager
at Lismore. A well-written preface confesses, as far as
the critics are concerned, "that if they who find some
faults in [this play] were as intimate with it as I am, they
would find a great many more." But the young play-
wright had little to fear from the critics. Applause was
universal, and came as freely from the men of letters as
from the public. Southerne, charmed to find his protege
a success, prefixed to the printed Old Bachelor a magnifi-
cent tribute of recognition : —
Dryden has long extended his command,
By right divine, quite through the Muses' l.'.nd,
Absolute Lord ; and, holding now from none
But great Apollo liis undoubted crown, —
(That empire settled, and grown old in power,)
Can wish for nothing but a successor,
Not to enlarge his limits, but maintain
Those provinces which he alone could gain.
J lis eldest, Wycherley, in wise retreat,
Thought it not worth his quiet to be great ;
Loose wandering Etheredge, in wild pleasures tost,
And foreign interests, to his hopes long lost ;
CONGREVE. 39
Poor Lee and Otway dead ! Con'GREVE appears
The Darling and last comfort of his years !
May'st thou live long in thy great Master's smiles,
And, growing under him, adorn these isles ;
But when, — when part of him (l^e that but late !)
Kis body yielding must submit to fate,
Leaving his deathless works, and thee, behind
(The natural successor of his mind),
Then may'st thou finish what he has begun.
Heir to his merit, be in fame his son.
We may be sure that Southerne, generously waiving \
his own claim to the poetical succession, would not have
addressed the lad of twenty-three in these exalted tones ■
if Dryden had not given the key-note. Following on )
the dedication to the Persius^ and taken with what we
know of Dryden's recorded utterances a little later, we
may take it for granted that the first poet of the age very
openly and explicitly expressed his full belief in a
splendid future for Congreve. Another congratulator, J.
D. Marsh, remarked that in The Old Bachelor Congreve,
Like a well-mettled hawk, took flight.
Quite out of reach and almost out of sight,
while Bevil Higgons, in words as direct as Southerne's,
predicted that the new poet would succeed Dryden, and
be the glory of the coming age. A very clever but most
indecent prologue was volunteered by an unknown bard,
and though not spoken, was printed ; it turned out to
be written by Anthony, fourth Lord Falkland. Already,
too, we find that Congreve's equable good-nature and
fidehty in friendship had struck those who knew him.
Hopkins, exiled from London, writes a letter in verse
40 LIFE OF
to Walter ]\Ioyle, published in 1694 in his Epistolary
Poems, in which he breathes his pious wishes thus for
his most eminent contemporaries : —
In full delights let sprightly Southerne live,
With all that woman and that wine can give ;
]\Iay generous Wycherley, all sufferings past,
Enjoy a well-deserved estate at last ;
Late, very late, may the great Dryden die.
But when deceased, may Congreve rise as high,
To him my service and my love commend,
The greatest wit and yet the truest friend —
•and such allusions to the great new poet, not less early
-are to be found elsewhere. The success of The Old
Bachelor was the most rousing event in our literary
\history between the Revolution and the accession of
Anne. Seldom has a new luminary appeared so vast
and so splendid as its orb first slipped above the horizon.
There were many reasons, besides the exceptional
combination of beauty and talent on the stage, why The
Old Bachelor should enjoy a great success. To us who
compare it, not wuth its predecessors, but with its three
greater and younger sisters, it may appear old-fashioned
and thin. Congreve w\^s always improving, and to see
\how his style developed we have only to put The Old
\Bachelor, where he is still a disciple of Wycherley, beside
The Way of the Worlds where he is superbly and entirely
himself. But to those who sat at the Theatre Royal
through that first performance in January, 1693, the effect
of so modern and so brilliant a play must have been
something overwhelming. The Revolution had put a
CONGRF.VE, 41
slight barrier between the old theatre and the new ; the
Restoration dramatists, with tlie exception of Dryden
and Shadwell, had given way to a younger school of
Orange poets, not yet generally recognized. Except for
Dryden's Amphitryon and Southerne's Sir Antho?iy Love,
not the one nor the other a very startling production,
comedy had gone back into the hands of Shadwell, who
was now just dead, after a recent period of great dramatic
activity. The plays of this unfortunate writer are not
by any means contemptible, but Shadwell preserved the
old coarse tradition of Restoration comedy, with its
violent demarcation of character, its fantastic jargon, and
its vulgarly emphatic incident. Eiheredge had now been
silent for twenty, and Wycherley for fifteen years. No
one had arisen who had accepted the principles of these
great fathers of our modern comedy, and it seemed as
though they had written in vain. Dryden never con-
trived to catch the secret of this Gallic lightness ; Crowne
had secured something of it once, in his Sir Courtly
Nice, only to lose it again immediately. In TJie Old
Bachelor it came back once more, and in a hand that was
as much firmer than Ethcredge's as it was subtler and
tenderer than Wycherley's. 1'he faults of the play w^re
due to the inexperience or timidity of the writer. The
merits were such as justified to the full the enthusiasm
of the age.
When Steele came to criiicise The Old Bachelor in
The Taller, he specially praised the distinction of the
characters. In Wycherley's comedies everybody had
been brutally witty all round ; ladies had talked like
rakes, and footmen had made similes. It would be
42 LIFE OF
interesting to know how far, in making this advance,
Congreve had wittingly gone to school with ^Moliere.
In Wycherley's drama not only the great French come-
dian, but Racine also, in his Flaideiirs, had been laid
under contribution. Manly and Olivia owed much to
their freer and more human prototypes, Alceste and
Celimene, and The Coimtry Wife directly recalls LEcole
des Feninics. In The Old Bachelor there is no positive
/evidence of the study of ISloliere, whom Congreve, who
read so much, must nevertheless have known familiarly,
but the direct influence of Wycherley is strongly marked.
Hartwell is only the Plain Dealer in another form ;
Fondlewife, in certain aspects, had already appeared as
Gripe in Love in a JVood, and as Pinchwife in The
Cou7itry Wife, Wittol and Bluff are as old as comedy
itself; they are fine old crusted stage properties, and we
need take no trouble to discover their originals. This
absence of novelty in the arrangement of the characters
makes it the more interesting that, as Steele says, they
are so strongly and carefully distinguished.
We read The Old Bachelor with interest, and return to
it with pleasure, but to the critic its main attraction is
that it marks the transition between the imitation of
Wycherley and Congreve's complete confidence in his
own powers. It contains some admirable single scenes.
The first in the second act, where Sharper persuades Sir
Joseph Wittol to pay him one hundred pounds for an
imaginary service is of the very first order. The character
of Vainlove, "one of Love's April fools," with his cynical
sensibility, is brought into excellent contrast with the
peevish frivolity of Belinda, and wins, without deserving
CO NCR EVE. 43
it, the steady affection of Araminta. The Fondlewife
and Letitia business has become too distressing for any
conceivable audience to endure, but is carried on with
the utmost vivacity and impudence. It has to be
admitted, on the other hand, that the fragments of the
play do not coalesce, that the perfection of the language
very imperfectly conceals or clothes the brutality of the
sentiments, and that we are only too well prepared for the
moral with which the fifth act closes : —
What rugged ways attend the noon of life !
Our sun declines, and with what anxious strife,
What pain, we tug that galling load a Wife.
Every artifice was introduced to make The Old
Bachelor popular — dances, pantomime, a song and
violins. The song, " Thus to a ripe consenting maid,"
is one of Congreve's best.
Malone suggested that the song which Congreve con-
tributed to South erne's comedy of The Maid's Last
Prayer was probably " the first acknowledged essay
presented by Congreve to the public." The Persius^
The Old Bachelor^ and Southerne's play appeared with
the same date, 1693, on the title-page of each, and
Malone did not know which came first. But from the
London Gazette we learn that The Maid's Last Prayer
was published on the 9th of March, 1693, and therefore
followed The Old Bachelor by at least six weeks. The
song occurs in the fifth act, and is a very typical example
of Congreve's satirical observation of the female heart : —
Tell me no more I am deceived.
That Chloe's false and common ;
44 LIFE OF
By Heaven ! I all abing believed
She was a very woman ;
As such I liked, as such caressed,
She still was constant, — when possessed.
She could do more for no man.
r.ut oh ! her thoughts on others ran,
And that you think a hard thing ?
Perhaps she fancied you the man ?
Why, what care I one farthing ?
You think she's false, I'm sure she's kind,
I'll take her body, you her mind.
\Yho has the better bargain ?
This song was set to music by Henry Purcell and sung
by Mrs. Ayliffe. As there is no record of any other
instance in which the great Purcell, who died two years
later, collaborated with Congreve, it is probably to this
time that must be attributed a story preserved in
Benjamin Victor's Epistle to Sir Richard Steele^ published
in 1722, when Congreve and Dennis were both still alive.
It runs thus : —
Mr. Purcell and Mr. Congreve, going into a tavern, by chance
met D s, who went in with 'em ; after a glass or two has passed,
Mr. Purcell, having some private business with Mr. Congreve,
wanted U s out of the room, and not knowing a more certain
way than punning, (for you are to understand. Sir, Mr. D s is as
much surprised at [a] Pun as at a Bailiff,) he proceeded after the
following manner. He pulled at the bell, and called two or three
times, but no one answering, he put his hand under the table, and
looking full at D s, he said, "I think this table is like the
Tavern." Says D s (with his usual profane phrase), "God's
death ! Sir, how is this table like the tavern?" "Why," says
Mr. Purcell, " because here's ne'er a drawer in it." Says D s,
CONGREVE. 45
starting up, " Sir, the man that will make such an execrable pun
as that in my company, will pick my pocket," and so left the
1 room.
The retort is well known, and has commonly been
attributed to Dr. Johnson.
> i
CHAPTER 11.
THE success of TJie Old Bachelor raised Congreve
at the age of twenty-three to the first rank among
contemporary poets. He was helped to support his
amazing hterary triumph by the accidental advantages
which nature had showered upon him. His person was
singularly beautiful, he was an athlete until fast living con-
sumed his constitution, and although indolent, he was so
Igracious and so sympathetic that he pleased without
effort, and conquered the esteem of those who might
^ave envied a popularity less indifferently borne. Dryden,
tis tradition tells us, liked him from the first, and as we
descend the year 1693 we discover various records of his
preference. In July, in his preface to the Third
Miscellany^ he brought Congreve's name forward, and
added that he was one " whom I cannot mention without
the honour which is due to his excellent parts, and that
entire affection which I bear him." To this same Third
Miscellaiiy Congreve contributed a fragment of translated
Homer, the lamentation of Priam on the body of Hector.
He is known to have been an admirable scholar, and
Dryden desired him to undertake a complete version of
the Iliad. Had he done so, Pope's translation would
LIFE OF COXGREVE. 47
probably have never seen the hght, but Congrcve was too
indolent for the execution of so extended a task. His
longest flight in this direction was taken later on when he
rendered into heroics the Hynm to Venus. In August,
writing to Jacob Tonson from Northamptonshire, Dryden
sends a message to no other London friend, yet adds :
" I am Mr. Congreve's true lover, and desire you to tell
him how kindly I take his often remembrances of me.
I wish him all prosperity, and hope I shall never lose his
affection."
jNIacaulay has positively stated, and Thackeray has
inferred, that immediately after the production of The
Old Bachelor^ Montague gave Congreve a place in the
Civil Service. Thackeray adds: " Doesn't it sound like a
fable, that place in the Pipe Office ? " If not exactly a
fable, it is at least a fact that rests on insufficient evidence.
It is founded, so far as I can discover, on the article in
the Biographia Britannica^ to which certain notes by
Southerne give a peculiar air of veracity. This article
says, that early in 1693, "Charles Montague, Lord
Halifax, being desirous to place so eminent a wit in a
state of ease and tranquillity, made him innnediaiely one
of the Commissioners for licensing hackney-coaches,
bestowed upon him soon after a place in the Pipe Office,
and gave him likewise a post in the Custom House of the
value of six hundred pounds a year." There is probably
some error here, so far as the word " immediately " is
concerned. In the first place, it is perhaps frivolous to
remark that Charles Montague did not become Lord
Halifax until December, 1700; but it is to the point to
notice that he was not made Chancellor of the Ex-
48 LIFE OF
chequer, and was not therefore in a position to scatter
gifts of place, until the summer of 1694. In the dedi-
cation to The Double Dealer, moreover, Congreve seems
to acknowledge, for the present at all events, none but
literary favours. Montague has read and criticized his
play, and he handsomely thanks him. If more material
favours had at this time been shown, ths poet must
have expressed his gratitude in other terms. Finally, in
a late poem of Swift's we read : —
Thus Congreve spent in writing inlays,
And one poor office, half his days ;
While jNIontague, who claimed the station
To be Maecenas to the nation,
For poets open table kept,
r>ut ne'er considered where they slept ;
Himself as rich as fifty Jews,
Was easy, though they wanted shoes,
And crazy Congreve scarce could spare
A shilling to discharge his chair.
" Crazy '' means feeble, invalided ; and therefore
cannot refer to a time when Congreve was in the flush
of youth and health ; while '• half his days," if roughly
calculated, brings us at earliest to 1700. On the whole, it
seems improbable that he was in possession of any
plurahties of office in these early days. He had some
private fortune, and his literary work was lucrative and
tolerably ample. The sale of his plays alone must have
been a source of considerable income. Until further
evidence is forthcoming we must hesitate to accept the
common view of Congreve as all through his life a holder
of fat sinecures.
He was not long in preparing a second comedy. Early
CONGREVE. 49
in Novcm])cr, 1693, The Double Dealer was produced at
the Theatre Royal. In a letter to Walsh, Dry den records
the comparative failure of this play. He says : " Con-
greve's Double Dealer is much censured by the greater
part of the town, and is defended only by the best
judges, who, you know, are commonly the fewest. Yet
it gains ground daily, and has already been acted eight
times." The reasons for this want of fortune are not far
to seek. " The gentlemen were offended with him for
the discovery of their follies," and, in particular, it would
seem, for the exposure of the hateful practice of making
personal friendship, without further excuse, a mask for
taking a dishonourable advantage in love. It is this
crime against which The Double Dealer is a satire, and so
far the moral purpose of Congreve seems praiseworthy.
But the heartless treachery of Maskwell, who is one of
the most appalling scoundrels in imaginative literature,
is overdone. He is a devil, pure and simple, and not a
man at all. When his skein of villanies is all unwound,
we feel inclined' to cry, with Lord Touchwood, " I am
confounded w4ien I look back, and want a clue to guide
me through the various mazes of unheard-of treachery.'*
Congreve w^as in the right when he objected to the stupid
way in which his satire had been received, but perhaps
he hardly realized what slaps he had given to the faces
of his audience. That he was very angry the epistle
dedicatory of his first edition shows. He retained part
of this well-written address to Montague, but as his temper
cooled he omitted the worst which he had said in his
wrath. It may be interesting to resuscitate the most
important of these omissions : —
4
IjO life of
And give ine leave, without any flattery to you, or vanity in my-
self, to tell my illiterate critics, as an answer to their impotent
objections, that they have found fault with that which has been
pleasing to 3'ou. This play, in relation to my concern for its repu-
tation, succeeded before it was acted, for through your early patron-
age, it had an audience of several persons of the first rank both in
wit and quality ; and their allowance of it was a consequence of
your approbation. Therefore if I really wish it might have had a
more popular reception, it i.^ not at all in consideration of myself,
but because I wish well, and would gladly contribute to, the benefit
of the stage and diversion of the town. They were not long since
so kind to a very imperfect comedy of mine that I thought myself
justly indebted to them all my endeavours for an entertainment that
might merit some little of that applause which they were so lavish
of when I thought I had no title to it. But I find they are to be
treated cheaply, and I have ])een at an unnecessary expense.
It is never wise to scold like this ; and here is some-
thing even worse : —
I hear a great many of the fools are angry at me, and I am glad
of it, for I writ at them, not to them. This is a bold confession,
and yet I don't think I shall disoblige one person by it, for nobody
can take it to himself, without owning the character.
The fact was that after drinking a cup of unexampled
sweetness, Congreve was now tasting the first bitter drop
of inevitable reaction. For biographical purposes we
have restored these evidences of his momentary petu-
lance, but let it not be forgotten that he himself imme-
diately suppressed them.
The cast was a strong one ; indeed, one would have
supposed, even stronger than that of The Old Bachelor.
Betterton gave the force of his robust genius to the
detestable character of }.Iaskwell, Doggett had a good
CONGREVE. 51
opportunity for his farcical vivacity in Sir Paul Plyant,
there were all the lovely ladies, the Bracegirdle, the
Barry, the Mountfort, the Leigh. In addition to these,
Kynaston, with his amazing beauty still unimpaired in
old age, reminded the spectators by his Lord Touch-
wood of that charm and bloom of youth which had
graced so many women's parts at the beginning of the
reign of Charles 11. But probably Williams was not
quite strong enough to carry him well through the
trying situations in which the hero, — if hero he be, —
Mellefont, is constantly placed by his trusting disposi-
tion. From what we gather, it would seem to have
been the incredulity of the audience in [Mellefont which
nearly wrecked the comedy.
But there was something worse than this. The ladies
were angry, as Dryden told Walsh, and to see why they
were angry needs no very great penetration. As is well
known, ladies came in masks to the first night of Restora-
tion and Orange comedies. They had good need to do
so, "Since free as the discourse may have been at their own
firesides, it was far outdone on the cynical and shameless
stage. The dramatists had again and again drawn atten-
tion, especially in their prologues and epilogues, to the
difficulty of distinguishing virtue from vice when each
wore a vizard. But no one had carried his satire so far,
or had pushed it home so keenly and so adroitly as
Congreve in the third act of the The Double Dealer.
"I find women," his Careless had said, "are not the
same bare-faced and in masks, and a vizor disguises
their inclinations as much as their faces." And Melle-
font, the man of virtue and honour, had replied, " 'Tis
52 LIFE OF
a mistake, for women may most properly be said to
be unmasked when they wear vizors, for that secures
them from blushing, and being out of countenance, and
next to being in the dark, or alone, they are most truly
themselves in a vizor-mask." The galleries " where," as
Crowne puts it, " roosting masques sat cackling for a
mate," must have thrilled with indignation at such
audacity. The poet told them, when they complained,
that they should no more expect to be complimented
in a comedy than tickled by the surgeon when they
went to be bled. The position was a bold one, and
Congreve dared to sustain it. It probably accounts for
his ultimate failure to please the public and the ladies,
.although he delighted the lettered world so con-
.•stantly.
A third reason assigned for the want of success of
The Double Deah)' is of more literary interest. It is
said that the audience resented the frequent sohloquies
by which Maskwell explained to them his intentions
and the progress of the intrigue. It is curious to find
Congreve making use of this artifice, because it seems
to take him back directly to the study of Moliere. The
English comic writers eschewed soliloquy very carefully.
Wycherley never, so far as I remember, leaves a single
•character alone upon the stage, and the theatre of Shadwell
habitually swarms like an ant-hill. On the other hand,
in several of Moliere's comedies, the central personage ot
the intrigue explains his purpose to the audience in an
aside, exactly in Congreve's way. George Dandin is an ex-
ample, and, i n L Amour Mcdecin Sganarelie. In LEtoiirdi^
and still more in Lc Dl/tt Anioiiraix soliloquies of Mas-
COXGREVE. 53
carille may almost be said to tie the loose members of those
plays together. Congreve thought it needful to excuse
his return to this old conventional practice, and said,
very justly, that "we ought not to imagine that this
man either talks to us, or to himself; he is only thinking,
and thinking such matter as it were inexcusable folly in
him to speak. But because we are concealed spectators
of the plot in agitation, and the Poet finds it necessary
to let us know the whole mystery of his contrivance, he
is willing to inform us of this person's thoughts, and
to that end is forced to make use of the expedient
of speech, no other better way being yet invented for
the communication of thought." Notwithstanding these
ingenious arguments, Congreve managed to do without
soliloquy in his next comedy, though he was obliged
to return to it in The Way of the World. His plays
were never really well-made, in the modern sense, but
no more are those of INIoliere or Shakespeare.
In his dedication to The Double Dealer Congreve
rather rashly asserts that he does not know that he
has "borrowed one hint of it anywhere." The general
design, however, with its five acts' triumph of a social
impostor, has some vague analogy with Tartuffe^ and
there are three prominent scenes in which Congreve
certainly followed, perhaps with conscious rivalry, in the
steps of his predecessors. The criticism of acquaint-
ances in the third act is obviously reminiscent of the
scene in Olivia's chamber in The Plain Dealer^ but
it is in every respect superior. The brutality and heart-
lessness of Wycherley's heroine are simply shocking,
while Congreve retains our sympath'es and shows his
54 LIFE OF
superior tact by making Cynthia disgusted at the spite
of Brisk and Lord Froth. Sheridan, long afterwards,
in essaying to produce the same effect, made no advance
upon the wit of Congreve.
It will perhaps be less generally conceded that in
competing with Tvloliere in the absurd blue-stocking
scene between Lady Froth and Brisk, and in the criticism
of her ladyship's remarkable lyric, the English poet
has the advantage. The conversation between Oronte
and Philinte, with Alceste growling in the background,
the fatuity of the " petits vers doux, tendres et lan-
goureux," the insight into the vanity of the amateur, —
these are delicious in the MisantJwope and of a very
high order of writing. But ^Moliere— dare we say it ? —
prolongs the scene a little too far ; the episode threaten
to become wearisome to all but literary spectators ;
whereas the brief and ludicrous exchange of compliments
betw^een Brisk and Lady Froth is soon over, the coach-
man-poem is in itself more funny than " L'Espoir," and
the whole incident, as it seems to me, is treated in a
more laughable, and dramatically in a more legitimate,
•way by Congreve than by INIoliere. It may be added
vthat this central portion of the third act is unquestionably
\the best part of the play, some of which is not quite
written up to its author's mark.
There is yet a third instance in which Congreve, in
spite of his claim to originality, must be held to have
undergone the influence of a predecessor. When Lady
Plyant pays her monstrous attentions to Mellefont, it is
impossible to avoid a comparison with the advances
Belise makes to Clitandre in the first act of Les Fcmmes
COXGREl'E. 55
Sai'dKics. This is what reminded Macaulay of the house
of Laius or of Pelops, and no one will deny its horror.
But in slieer wit and intellectual daring, the English
dialogue does not seem to me to be at all inferior to the
French.
The Double Dealer contains some excellent characters.
Sir Paul Plyant, with his night-cap made out of a piece
of a scarlet petticoat, tied up in bed, out of harm's way,
and looking^, with his iireat beard, like a Russian bear
upon a drift of snow, is wholly delightful ; and Lady
P>oth, the charming young blue-stocking, with her wit
and her pedantry, her affectation and her merry vitality,
is one of the best and most complex characters that
Congreve has created. Her doting affection for her
j^hild, "poor little Sappho," mingled with her interest
in her own ridiculous verses, and set off by her genuine
ability and power, combine to form a very life-like
picture. Twenty years earlier she might have been
supposed to be a study of Margaret, Duchess of New-
castle. Her astronomical experiments with I\Ir. Brisk
are a concession on the poet's part to the worst instincts
of his audience, and funny as they undeniably are, they
spoil the part.
A fault in the construction of T/ie Double Dealer
is that Lord and Lady Froth are not sharply enough
distinguished from Lord and Lady Touchwood. In
Cynthia, Congreve produced one of those gracious and
honest maidens whom he liked to preserve in the wild
satiric garden of his drama, that his beloved jNIrs. Brace-
girdle might have a pure and impassioned part to play.
We owe to this penchant the fortunate circumstance
5G LIFE OF
that, while in Etheredge, Wycherlcy, and Vanbrugh there
is often not a single character that we can esteem or
personally tolerate from the beginning of the play to the
end, in Congrevc there is always sure to be one lady
of reputation, even if she be not c^uite of the crystalline
order of that more famous Lady, who walked among
apes and tigers in the boskages of Comus.
The Double Dealer was published on the 4th of
December, 1693,' with the date 1694 on the title-
page. Every part of the publication breathed defiance.
The motto on the title was " Interdum tamen, et vocem
comaedia tollit," and the new Chremes raged in the
dedication to Montague, of which mention has already
been made. Moreover, in large italic type, an epistle
" To my dear Friend Mr. Congreve," displayed the scorn
and anger of Dryden at this new exhibition of public
tastelessness. This poem, in seventy-seven of Dryden's
most muscular verses, sealed Congreve with the stamp
of immortality. Perhaps since the beginning of literary
history there is no other example of such full and
generous praise of a young colleague by a great old
poet. Dryden goes back to " the giant race before the
flood," the race of Elizabeth, who wrote magnificently
by instinct, ignoring the rules of art. Then came
Charles 11. , and his poets, who cultivated verse-making,
and of whom Dryden himself was chief; "but what we
gained in skill we lost in strength." The architectonics
of post-Restoration poetry had lacked something, in spite
of the science of the builders,
' " London Gazette."
CONG R EVE. 57
Till you, the best Yitruvius, come at length,
Our beauties equal, but excel our strength ;
P'irm Doric pillars found your solid base,
The fair Corinthian crowns the higher space,
Thus all below is strenf^ih and all above is sirace.
Fletcher was master of easy dialogue, he says, and
Jonson had all that judgment could give ; Congreve
excels them both, the first in wit, the second in learning.
Etheredge,Wycherley,andSoutherne have started modern
comedy, but all rejoice to see Congreve lightly pass
them, " ravis," as Racine would say, " d'etre vaincus dans
leur propre science ; "
All this in blooming youth you have achieved,
Nor are your foiled contemporaries grieved.
So much the sweetness of your manners move,
We cannot envy you, because we love.
After bringing his survey of our dramatic literature to
a close with a characteristic flout at the dead Shadwell
and the living Rymer, Dryden proceeds to bequeath his
own crown of bays to Congreve : —
And this I prophecy, — thou shalt be seen
(Though with some short parenthesis between)
High on the throne of wit, and, seated there,
Not mine (that's little), but thy laurel wear.
Thy first attempt an early promise made,
That early promise this has more than paid ;
So bold, yet so judiciously you dare.
That your least praise is to be regular ;
58 LIFE OF
Time, place and action may with pains be wrought,
Eut genius must be born, and never can be taught :
This is your portion, this your native store ;
Heaven that but once was prodigal before,
To Shakespeare gave as much, she could not give liim more.
Dryden proceeds, after this sumptuous eulogy, to refer
in pathetic numbers to his own condition ; he is already
worn with cares and age, and just abandoning the
ungrateful stage, but he foresees that Congreve is born
to better fortune, and in reflecting on his own end, he
breaks out into these poignant and justiy celebrated
lines : —
Ee kind to my remains ; and oh ! defend.
Against your judgment, your departed friend !
Let not the insulting io^ my fame pursue,
Eut shade those laurels which descend to you.
We shall see later on that Congreve showed by his
fidelity to Dryden's reputation that he deserved the
confidence so tenderly reposed in him.
It was the singular good fortune of this unsuccessful
comedy to call forth in its defence, not merely the
greatest poet of the existing age, but the leading genius
of the next. In November, and before Queen IMary's
visit turned the tide in favour of The Double Dealer^
Swift had addressed to Congreve a long epistle, extending
to more than two hundred lines. Three tinies before, he
says, he had tried to write his friend a poem, but in
vain; the rhymes refused to come. On this slightly
more propitious occasion they flowed, it is plain,
uneasily and awkwardly. It is curious to contrast the
COXGREVE. 59
vigour of the thoughts and the strength of character they
displayed, with the ckimsy and often scarcely intelligible
form. Swift was no poet, and with unusual modesty he
admits it liimself. " No power," he says, " beneath
divine could leap the bonds which part your world and
mine," that is, the worlds of the poet and the poetaster.
His praise of Congreve is not more stinted than
Dryden's ;
For never dIJ poetic raiind before
Produce a richer vein, or clearer ore,
he says, and asserts
God-like the force of my young Congreve's bays.
It is disappointing to feel that Swift on this occasion
might have, and yet did not give us any personal
account of his friend. But he says, that a young spark
from Farnham, who has been up to town, has brought
back a rumour that Congreve talks of writing an heroic
tragedy. This looks as though The Mourning Bride v/as
on the stocks so early as November, 1693. This lad
from Farnham speaks of " V^ycherley and you and Mr.
Bays," that is, Dryden, as the three first poets of the day,
and arbiters of taste at Will's ; so that Congreve was by
this time openly recognized as Crown Prince in the
Empire of literature.
It was Queen Mary's visit to TJie Double Dealer \vhich
led to a somewhat remarkable event in theatrical history.
It so happened that en that afternoon Kynaston Vv-as too
ill to play the part of Lord Touchwood. There was
60 LIFE OF
hanging about the Theatre Royal a young man of great
ambition, who had been an actor since 16S9, but who
had hitherto found no chance of distinguishing himself.
He had, however, attracted Congreve's attention, and in
the embarrassing circumstances described, the poet re-
commended that the vacant [)art should be entrusted to
Colley Gibber. The latter describes his rapture in the
Apology^ but his memory played him false in a detail, for
he quotes, as spoken on that occasion, certain words
which were specially written for a latter performance,
that of the revival of The Old Bachelor. His own point
was that his position as an actor was secured ; he played
Lord Touchwood extremely well, and Congreve very
handsomely came round to him afterwards and told him
that he had exceeded his expectations, and that he
should recommend him to the Patentees. He was as good
as his word, and Gibber's salary was forthwith raised from
fifteen to twenty shillings a week. But Kynaston came
back, there was no vacancy in the ranks, and Gibber had
to wait a while longer before he took the place he longed
for as jeune premier.
The year 1694 is almost a blank in \\\i history of our
poet. Queen Mary had been so much pleased with The
Double Dealer^ that she ordered the revival of The Old
Bachelor^ which she had not seen. Gongreve wrote for
the occasion a special prologue of a more business-like
than strictly poetical character, pointing out how advan-
tageous it would be for the dramatists if royalty would
take the trouble to visit the theatre a little less seldom.
His silence, with this exception, throughout the year is
perhaps accounted for to some extent by an *' epigram "
COXGREl^E. 01
in Gildon's C/ioms Fodajinn, 1694, *'on the late sickness
of Madam ^Mohun and Mr. Congreve " —
One fatal day a sympathetic fire
Seized him that wrote and her that did inspire,
Mohun, the INIuses' theme, their master Congreve,
Beauty and wit, had like to have lain in one grave.
Tliis Madam IMohun, probably, was the wife of Major
Mohun, the tragic actor.
Another name was now added to the illustrious bead-
roll of Congreve's friends. Pie became acquainted with
a very brilliant young bachelor of Magdalen College,
Oxford, ]Mr. Joseph Addison, already celebrated for his
proficiency in Latin verses. Long afterwards, when he
came to dedicate The Drummer to Congreve, in 1722,
Steele said that it was Congreve who started Addison in
public life, by being the instrument of his acquaintance
with Montague. It was probably in return for this
courtesy that Addison, addressing on the 3rd of April,
1694, his Acco2mt of the Greatest English Poets to Henry
Sacherevell, congratulated Dryden on his successor in
these terms : —
How might we fear our English poetry,
That long had flourished, should decay with thee,
Did not the Muses' other hope appear.
Harmonious Congreve, and forbid our fear ;
Congreve ! whose fancy's unexhausted store
Has given already much, and promised more.
Congreve shall still preserve thy fame alive,
And Dryden's Muse shall in his friend survive.
The closing lines of the poem referred to Addison's
62 LIFE OF
intention of taking orders. It appears to have been
Congreve, who, perceiving tlie young man's integrity and
business capacity, advised Montague to make "warm
instances " to Dr. Lancaster to preserve Addison as a
layman. The resuU of this interference was, as every-
body knows, eminently beneficial to Addison's fortunes.
It should be noted that when Steele, thirty years later,
desired to reprove Tickell for what he conceived to be a
misrepresentation of Addison's early motives, it was to
Congreve, as then the oldest of his intimate surviving
friends, to whom he addressed his appeal.
During the year 1694 the theatrical world of London was
painfully disturbed by the breaking out of that civil war
at Drury Lane which threatened at one time to leave
us entirely without a stage. For four years the united
Patentees of the Theatre Royal had suffered no rivalry
of any kind; they had enjoyed a monopol}', and they had
been so anxious to swell their own dividends, that they
had reduced the actors to very miserable salaries. As a
matter of fact, however, their ov*-n receipts had become in-
sufficient to keep them out of debt, since every one con-
nected with the theatre had, it appears from what Gibber
tells us, embarked on that extraordinary enterprise of
Betterton's, that Indian argosy which was intended to
make nabobs of the whole company at Drury Lane, and
which so ignominiously fell into the hands of the French
at the mouth of the English Channel in 1692. It was
partly to revenge themselves for having been drawn into
this misfortune and partly to lessen the prestige of the
great actor, that the Patentees now began, in a very
contrary way, to take from Betterton some of his most
CONGREVE. C3
famous leading parts, and give them to young actors,
whom they paid no better for such promotion. The
direct result of this was that the audiences began to fall
off. In vain the Patentees endeavoured to excite
curiosity by such operas as Dryden's King Arthur and
Betterton's Frophetess. In vain they produced, in 1694,
so very taking a tragedy as Southerne's Fatal Marriage.
Nothing would galvanize the dying theatre, which the
loss of Alountfort, Leigh, and Nokes had seriously injured ;
the public became aware of the internal dissensions
between actors and Patentees ; and the dead-lock had
cost the theatre a thousand pounds before Christmas
came.
At last the actors combined to lay their grievances
before Lord Dorset, the poet, who was then Lord
Chamberlain. He consulted the legal advisers of the
Government and received from them an opinion "that
no patent for acting plays, etc., could tie up the hands
of a succeeding prince, from granting the like authority,
where it might be proper to trust."' In other words, it
was decided that the king might destroy the monopoly of
Drury Lane. While Betterton and his friends, elated
by this discovery, were hoping to push their scheme
forward, they received a temporary check in the death of
Queen Mary, which happened on the December 28,
1694. This event plunged England into mourning, and
gave the minor poets an unrivalled opportunity for lyric
grief. During the months of January and February a
shoal of blank folio pamphlets, all with a deep black border
round their title-pages, issued from the press, signed by
the pens of Steele, Gould, Tate, D'Urfey, Walsh, Stepney,
64 LIFE OF
Dennis, ihc Duke of Devonshire, and Sam Wesley, to
mention no otlicrs. The death of the Archbishop of
Canterbury having occurred about the same time, some
of the funeral hari)s sounded melodiously a double woe.
Dryden was silent on this occasion ; but Congreve
published, on January 28, 1695,^ a sort of elegiac
pastoral, entitled The Mourning Muse of Alexis, for which,
as Luttrel tells us, his Majesty ordered that he should be
paid one hundred pounds. This is the poem which
Johnson so violently styled " a despicable effusion ; a
composition in which all is unnatural, and yet nothing is
new." Nor has it found a single modern friend, except,
oddly enough, a French critic, ]\I. de Grisy, who styles
the poem "sensible et presque touchant," and describes
it as an interesting introduction to The Mourning Bride.
It is dangerous to follow Dr. Johnson in his estimates
of poetry, and one reason, at least, why he objected
so strongly to The Mourning Muse of Alexis is that it
takes its inspiration, such as it is, from Spenser. Congreve
invokes Virgil, and in default of the Mantuan, he calls on
Spenser and Sidney. His poem is a dialogue between two
shepherds, i\lexis and Menalcas, and the latter remarks
to the former, in the shadow of some cavern : —
For fragrant myrtle and the blushing rose,
Here baleful yew and deadly cypress grows ;
Here then extended on this withered moss,
We'll lie, and thou shalt sing of Albion's loss ;
Of Albion's loss, and of Pastora's death.
Begin thy mournful song, and raise thy tuneful breath.
The piece is smooth and musical, but full of vapid
^ *' London Gazette."
CO NCR EVE. 65
conceits ; the flocks can graze now Queen Mary is dead,
when she was ahve they grew hungry by gazing on her
face ; the vault in which her body Hes has oozy walls,
and the poet, therefore, calls it a crocodile for pretending
to lament its prey ; Queen Mary was tall, and Congreve
thinks it clever to say that she excelled all other nymphs
in stature as the lofty pine o'ertops the reed. Swans,
"sickening swans," are exhorted to leave their rivers, and
hasten to die at her tomb, that their swan-song may be
her elegy. And it all closes with this elegant alexandrian
extravagance : —
But see, Menalcas, where a sudden light
With wonder stops my song, and strikes my sight,
And where Pastora lies it spreads around,
Showing all radiant bright the sacred ground,
While from her tomb behold a flame ascends
Of whitest fire, whose flight to heaven extends ;
On flakey wings it mounts, and quick as sight
Cuts through the yielding air with rays of light,
Till the blue firmament at last it gains,
And, fixing there, a glorious star remains ;
P airest it shines of all that light the skies,
As once on earth were seen Pastora's eyes.
Strange that the wittiest writer of the age should be blind
to the fatuity of lines that he ought to have reserved for
the portfolio of Lady Froth !
The obsequies of Pastora only interrupted for a while
the critical division at Drury Lane. Early in 1695,
Betterton and the principal actors had an interview with
William III., and were received by him with a great deal
of kindness. He graciously empowered them, by a
special royal license, to act elsewhere than in the Theatre
5
6G LIFE OF
Royal in Drury Lane. Tliis was a very important con-
cession, and one which rendered Betterton independent
of the Patentees. The next thing was to raise by private
subscription, in shares of forty guineas and twenty
guineas respectively, enough money to build a new
theatre within the walls of the tennis-court of Lincoln's
Inn Fields. The Patentees meanwhile, by promises of
increased salaries, had caused a certain number of the
actors to desert Betterton. Among these were Kynaston,
Powell and Penkethman, while Colley Gibber and
Verbruggen came into a prominence which they had
never before enjoyed. The ladies, on the other hand,
were extremely staunch. Early in the fray Mrs. Brace-
girdle had nobly refused to take any of Mrs. Barry's parts,,
and the Patentees were thrown entirely upon actresses
whom the pubhc did not recognize. In their despair
they had closed the Theatre Royal altogether, and from
Christmas, 1694, to Easter, 1695, ^^ would seem thai-
London was entirely destitute of dramatic representation.
On Easter Monday, however, the Patentees reopened with
a revival of Mrs. Aphra Behn's Abdelazar^ an unlucky
choice, one would imagine. On the first afternoon, Gibber
tells us, the house was very full, but whether it was the
play or the actors that were not approved, the audience
next day had sunk to nothing. IMeanwhile, the process
of building was going on merrily in the Lincoln's Inn
tennis-court, and on the 30th of April the new rival house
was opened with a fresh comedy by Congreve.
This play, Love Jo r Love, had been finished in 1694^
had been read and accepted by the Patentees, and only
narrowly had escaped being acted perforce at Drury Lane.
CONGREVE. 07
Fortunalely, the split between Betterton and the Paten-
tees began to take alarming proportions before the
articles of agreement were signed, and Congreve was
astute enough to pause, and to see, before signing, what
the event of the quarrel would be. The result was one
in the highest degree beneficial to Betterton's company,
for Congreve was now, without a rival, at the head of .
English dramatic artists. In order to secure the aid
and sympathy of so valuable an ally, the management
of Lincoln's Inn Theatre offered Congreve a share in
their profits, on similar terms to those offered long before
by the King's Company to Dryden, namely, that he
should write exclusively for them. He pledged himself, ^
"if his health permitted," to give them one new play I
every year. This parenthetical clause shows that already,
at the age of twenty-five, the life of the tavern and the jl
coffee-house was beginning to tell on the poet's consti- /
tution. It is scarcely needful to say that he did not (\\
carry out his engagement. He produced two more plays, :-^'|
at intervals of three years, and then contributed nothing ' ;
more to the regular stage.
At the very outset, and while Love for Love was in
rehearsal, an incident occurred which endangered the
future of the play and of the house. Mrs. Mountfort,
who was one of the most valuable actresses of the
hour, whose vivacity and activity combined to make her
an inimitable humourist and the very nonpareil of j\Iis5
Prues, threw up her part, because she was not allowed to
be an equal sharer with the rest in the profits of the new
concern. Williams, a young actor of respectable gifts,
joined her in this mutiny, for the same cause, and just
€8 LIFE OF
before the performance opened these persons seceded to
the Theatre Royal. We owe to CoUey Gibber the ex-
planation, which no commentator of a later age could
have supplied, that this desertion is referred to by Con-
greve in the prologue to Love for Love^ when he says,
congratulating the actors on their new theatre being an
Eden —
But since in Paradise frail flesh gave way,
And when but two were made, both went astray,
Forbear your wonder, and the fault forgive,
If in our larger family we grieve
One falling Adam and one templed Eve.
This entire prologue is full of references which must
have interested the audience, allusions to the burning
questions of the stage, and small congratulatory con-
fessions.
The cast, although in certain respects impoverished,
was strengthened with some good new blood. In par-
ticular, Underbill, whose playing of Sir Sampson Legend
always remained one of his famous parts, was a genuine
acquisition. He was famous for making up a dull and
mulish face of paternal perversity which threw the spec-
tators into fits of mirth, and one of the greatest successes
of Love for Love was the scene in which he bantered
Foresight on his astrological attainments. Foresight, one
of the quaintest and most original characters ever placed
on the stage, was played by Sandford, another great
acquisition, famous for his rendering of violent and gro-
tesque parts, an actor whose ugliness and physical
deformity made it absolutely requisite that he should
CONGREVE. m
personate crime or folly. Ben Legend, the sailor, was
created as a part by Dogget, who attained such an
extraordinary distinction in this novel character that in
due time he lost his head with vanity, and about a year
afterwards went over to the Patentees again, merely
because he was so inflated with the sense of his own
importance that he could not be satisfied with anything
short of the best roles on every occasion. We hear less
that is definite about the mark made by the rest,
although Mrs. Bracegirdle is known to have been divine
in Angelica. It is difficult not to suppose that Betterton
was now a little too old and heavy for Valentine, but if,
as seems possible, Betterton was more like Delaunay than
like any other actor whom we have seen in this genera-
tion, we can imagine that he might still, at sixty, make a
very passable young philosophic spark. The inimitable
sisters. Frail and Foresight, were taken by Mrs. Barry
and Mrs. Bowman.
The comedy of Love for Love has been commonly
accounted Congreve's masterpiece, and perhaps with
justice. It is not quite so uniformly brilliant in style
as The Way of the World, but it has the advantage of
possessing a much wholesomer relation to humanity than
that play, which is almost undiluted satire, and a more
theatrical arrangement of scenes. In Love for Love the
qualities which had shown themselves in The Old
Bachelor and The Double Dealer recur, but in a much
stronger degree. The sentiments are more unexpected,
the language is more picturesque, the characters have
more activity of mind and vitality of nature. All that
was merely pink has deepened into scarlet ; even what is
70 LIFE OF
disagreeable, — the crudity of allusion and the indecency
of phrase, — have increased. The style in all its parts
and qualities has become more vivid. We are lookinp^
through the same telescope as before, but the sight is
better adjusted, the outlines are more definite, and the
colours more intense. So wonderfully felicitous is the
phraseology that we cannot doubt that if Congreve could
only have kept himself unspotted from the sins of the
age, dozens of tags would have passed, like bits of
Shakespeare, Pope, and Gray, into habitual parlance.
In spite of its errors against decency, Love for Love
survived on the stage for more than a century, long after
the remainder of Restoration and Orange drama was
well-nigh extinct. Hazlitt saw it played, and thus
describes it : —
It still acts, and is still acted well. The effect of it is prodigious
on the well-informed spectator. In particular, Munden's Foresight,
if it is not just the thing, is a wonderfully rich and powerful piece
of comic acting. His look is planet-struck ; his dress and appear-
ance like one of the signs of the zodiac taken down. Nothing can
be more bewildered ; and it only wants a little more helplessness,
a little more of the doting, querulous, garullity of age, to be all that
one conceives of the superannuated, star-gazing original.
The plot of Love for Love forms more interesting a
story than is usually the case with Congreve. His two
first plays had possessed no plot at all, properly speaking, '
but only in the one case a set of amatory scenes, and in
the other a series of satirical situations. The hero of
Love for Love, Valentine Legend, is a young Cambridge
man, a scholar, one who loves Plato and Epictetus, but
CONG RE VE. 71
^vho loves pleasure also, and who, partly out of pique
because Angelica, the beautiful heiress, will not marry
him, has wasted all his fortune, and is reduced to the
husks of a prodigal son. AVhen the play opens he is
attended in his poor lodging by his servant Jeremy, a
cjuaint and witty fellow, who is devoted to him and will
not leave him. During the first act, Valentine is visited
in succession by his friends Scandal and Tattle, by Trap-
land, a scrivener, from whom he has borrowed money, and
by Mrs. Frail, the gay and pretty aunt of Angelica.
Their dialogue displays, besides the unparalleled wit of
each speaker, the despairing conditions to which the
fortunes of Valentine are reduced.
The father of Angelica is the ridiculous old astrologer
Foresight, in whose house the second act opens. His
daughter descends, greets him, teases him, and rides away
in her sedan. Sir Sampson Legend, the father of Valentine,
presents himself to '' old Nostradamus " Foresight, with
the intention of informing him that he is about to dis-
inherit Valentine, who will thereupon cease to be an
eligible suitor for the hand of Angelica. The two old
gentlemen, however, fall into a ludicrous discussion about
celestial spheres, sextiles, and fiery trigons on the one
side, and the Grand Mogul's slipper, Egyptian mummies,
and indiscretions of the court of the King of Bantam on
the other, for Sir Sampson has been a great traveller in
his day. While they are wrangling, Valentine enters, and
he and his father have one of the most admirable scenes
in all comedy, where the question of hereditary responsi-
bility is gone into with a seriousness that is unusual on
Congreve's cynical stage. The end of it is Sir Sampson
72 LIFE OF
will give his son four thousand pounds to pay his debts
widi, but on condition that he resigns all claim to the
estate on behalf of his younger brother Ban, the sailor,
who is now returned from a long voyage. Valentine
retires, but although he has been so ill received he is
satisfied, for he has been seen to treat his father with
respect. His visit, however, leaves him as uncertain as
ever in what light Angelica regards him.
The stage being now empty, the lively sisters ^Irs.
Foresight and Mrs. Frail come on to divert us. Mrs.
Foresight adopts the most prudish attitude towards Mrs.
Frail, and at last accuses her of having an assignation
at a place ciUed The World's End. i\Irs. Frail denies
everything, when ^Irs. Foresight, to clinch the accusation,
produces an object, and says, "Where did you lose this
gold bodkin ? Oh sister ! sister ! " Upon which Mrs.
Frail makes the unexpected and wholly delightful return,
" Well, if you go to that, where did you find this bodkin ?
Oh, sister ! sister ! " They determine that it is worse
than useless to spy upon one another, and take a
humorous vow of mutual fidelity. Frail then acknow -
ledges that she wants to marry Ben, who now, by Valen-
tine's misfortune, is to inherit the Legend estates. Ben,
however, is betrothed to marry Airs. Foresight's step-
daughter Prue. The precious pair determine to make
Prue marry Mr. Tattle, and so to leave Ben free for Mrs.
Frail. The act closes with a scene full of broad humour,
indeed too broad sometimes, between Tattle and Prue,
who are purposely left together by the sisters. Prue,
though so young and ignorant, proves as adroit a flirt " as
if she had been born and bred in Covent Garden."
CO NCR EVE. 73
In the third act, Tattle, flying from True, finds Angehca
and Valentine together, ^Yhile Scandal jeers at and banters
each in turn. They all unite to torture with their wit
the bragging and incautious Tattle. The scene closes
with " A nymph and a swain to Apollo once prayed,"
one of the most graceful and most cynical of Congreve's
lyrics. But Sir Sampson rushes in with a roar ; he has
heard that his son Ben, the sea-dog, has arrived. At
this Valentine slips away, " we are the twin-stars," he says,
" and cannot shine in one sphere." As he goes, he makes
an appeal to Angelica, but she declares she cannot come
to any resolution. She turns, when he is gone, to Sir
Sampson in a pique, and declares roundly that she wishes
nothing but estates in a husband, and that no one would
now induce her to marry Valentine, a sentiment that Sir
Sampson is vigorously applauding, when Ben rolls in.
He talks in a big voice, and with such a rough volley of
tarpaulin slang, that Angelica, the superfine, swears ironi-
cally that " Mr. Benjamin is the veriest wag in nature, an
absolute sea-wit." She is soon appeased, however, and
Ben is left alone with Prue, his little betrothed.
The next scene is comedy holding both its sides ; the
ill-matched couple quarrel till she calls him "stinking tar-
barrel," and he says that she is worse than " a Lapland
witch." Frail and Foresight, who have been listening, enter,
and while Foresight hurries Prue away, Frail stays behind
to console the outraged Ben. Sir Sampson and Foresight
come by, chuckling ; there shall be a wedding to-morrow,
and Ben must marry Prue. Their mirth is checked by
Slander, who enters with a long face, and has bad news
to break to them. Valentine's mind has given way under
74 LIFE OF
the strain of his emotions, and he is raving mad. Sir
Sampson at once declares that he beheves it to be a pre-
tence to avoid signing the conveyance, but he will come
with a lawyer and force the rogue to sign. The act pro-
longs itself with unnecessary pleasantries, but closes at
last with Ben's promise to throw off Prue and marry Mrs.
Frail. Ben says good-night to the ladies, and sings " A
soldier and a sailor " to them before he goes off to the
tavern for a can of beer.
The fourth act opens next morning at Valentine's
lodgings. The mock-patient is prepared by Scandal and
Jeremy to receive the most compromising visitors.
Angelica is the first to arrive, and is not successful in her
attempt to conceal her anxiety ; Scandal pretends to think
her visit is tyrannically made " to insult her ruined lover,
and make manifest the cruel triumphs of her beauty,"
and she is being moved almost to tears, when she sees
Scandal wink to Jeremy, and suspects a trick at once.
She rounds upon them, having recovered her savoir-faire^
and declaring it to be unnecessary for her to see the
poor demented fellow, she and her maid take their leave.
Next arrive Sir Sampson and Buckram the conveyancer.
They have to be introduced, and so, after a while, the
scene opens, and Valentine is discovered, lying in a state
of disorder on his couch. Sir Sampson is convinced that
it is a genuine case of insanity ; Valentine rolls off a series
of wonderful apostrophes, and rates the lawyer till he flies
off in a panic, declaring Valentine non compos^ and quite
unfit to sign any deed. Valentine promptly recovers as
soon as Buckram is gone, sighs, and sinks on his knee
to gain his father's blessing. Sir Sampson makes sure of
CONGREVE. 75
his son's sanity, and then rushes out to fetch Buckram
back once more ; but the lawyer's return brings Valen-
tine's fit on again, and more violently than ever. Sir
Sampson has to explain to Ben that the estate cannot
come to him at present, and hints moreover that he may
marry again himself. On hearing this Mrs. Frail's inte-
rest in Ben instantly wanes, and, calling him a porpoise,
she jilts him. Mrs. Foresight now proposes that her
sister should try to engage herself, during his madness, to
Valentine. The latter enters into the idea, and pretends
to take Frail for Angelica, offering to marry her at dead
of night at once, wath Endymion and the Moon for wit-
nesses. While he is perplexing e very bod \^, the real
Angelica comes again ; Valentine at once informs her of
his trick, but she pretends to disbelieve him, and persists
in treating him as if he was actually mad. This act is
adorned with an exceedingly delicate and musical lyric,
"I tell thee, Charmion, could I time retrieve."
Sir Sampson, who reminds himself that he is only fifty,
begins to think that the best way out of the imbroglio
will be for him in person to marry Angelica and her for-
tune. Angelica, for certain ends, is not unwilling to
allow him to indulge this preposterous fancy. Tattle
also has designs on Angelica, as Frail has on Valentine,
and the next thing we hear is, that under close disguise,
each thinking the other was our hero or our heroine,
Tattle and Frail have been irrevocably w^edded. Valen-
tine appears, and, believing that Angelica is genuinely
indifferent to him, expresses his readiness to sign tlie
conveyance, which will double her fortune if she marries
Sir Sampson. But Angelica snatches the deed from him,
76 LIFE OF
and tears it into fragments, while the fiddlers whom Sir
Sampson had ordered for his wedding strike up for the
auspicious nuptials of Valentine and Angelica : —
The miracle to-day is, that we find
A lover true ; not, that a woman's kind.
There is one excellent point about this plot, namely
that, having never represented vice as supremely interest-
ing, it closes with a deliberate concession of good fortune
to virtue. With those critics who have found Angelica
hard and unsympathetic, I cannot agree. To me she is
one of the most delightful of all comic heroines; refined
and distinguished in nature, she refuses to wear her
heart upon her sleeve, and her learned young spark, with
his airs of the academic beau, has to deserve her, or
seem to deserve her, before she yields to his somewhat
impudent suit. If she tricks him it is only when she
finds him tricking her, and the artifice in neither case is
very serious. No, Angelica is charming in her presence
of mind and lady-like dignity, and reigns easily first
among the creations, not only of Congreve, but of post-
Restoration comedy down to Goldsmith. She is the
comic sister of Belvidera, and these two preserve that
corrupt and cynical stage from moral contumely.
One minor character in Love for Loz'c deserves special
attention. Ben Legend, the " absolute sea-wit," is the
founder of a long line of stage-sailors, of whom he is the
earliest specimen. Mr. Hannay, with the natural desire
of a biographer to give the glory to Smollett, has depre-
ciated Congreve's creation, and says that Ben is "a
landsman's sailor, drawn by a man ^^ ho was not familiar
CONGREVE. 77
enough with more than the outside of the hfe to give
vitahty to the picture." On this point a critic, who is
also a landsman, may hesitate to express his opinion ; but
lack of vitality hardly strikes one as characteristic of Ben.
The tarpaulin type seems faithfully studied and vigorously
drawn, and I doubt much whether Congreve could have
created so salt a sailor, with a smack of the very sea
about him, out of his internal consciousness. The
moment Ben is slightly thwarted he remembers he has
another voyage to make. We sailors, he says, are merry
folk ; we come home once a year, get rid of a little money,
and then put off with the next fair wind. Mrs. Frail gets
the Wind side of him by the bold use of a marine
metaphor, and he wishes he had Prue at sea to give
her a salt eel for her supper. When his family
sentimentalizes over his desperate voyages, he has no
other reply than, " Been far enough, an that be all ! "
Good or bad, no sailor in fiction — except, as Mr. Hannay
acutely points out, those in The Fair Quaker of Kent —
approached him till the days of Jack Rattlin and Tom
Bowling.
The book of Love for Love (published May 9, 1695 0>
was dedicated to Lord Dorset in a short preface, where
the author confesses the main error of his play, its pro-
lixity, and tells us that one scene, probably that between
Scandal and Foresight in the middle of the third act, had
to be omitted in representation. Love for Love is by far the
longest of Congreve's five plays, and although no reader
can ever have wished it shorter, it must have taken a
very long time in representation, especially as it contains
' " London Gazette."
78 LIFE OF
no less than three songs for music and a dance. The
play was very successful in book form, and several
editions of 1695 exist. It had an unprecedented run,
for, with certain breaks, it continued to be played at
Lincoln's Inn Fields for the remainder of the year.
The only one fresh play brought out that season at the
new theatre seems to have been the Fyrr/ms, of Charles
Hopkins, the first tragedy of a young poet who had
gained the warm friendship of Dryden, and who might
have won a considerable reputation if he had lived. To
PyrrJius Congreve contributed a prologue, which was
published with the play. This is a witty piece of occa-
sion, comparing the serried ranks of the two theatres to
the armies of Rome and of Epirus.
One of Congreve's most agreeable characteristics was
his friendliness. We have no record of his falling out
with any one, and he had the art to remain on intimate
terms with those who could not speak to one another.
With Dryden and with Swift, with Dennis and with Pope,
with Addison and with Steele, no matter what anger
ruled in their celestial minds, nor what dissensions
arrived, Congreve was always on the friendliest footing.
Of the men whose names have just been cited, John
Dennis, the Sir Tremendous of Pope's satire, was un-
questionably the most choleric, but at all times Dennis
was on terms of unbroken civility with Congreve. In
consequence of this acquaintance, and of some vanity no
doubt on Dennis' part as the public friend of so eminent
a poet, we get in the latter part of 1695 some glimpse of
Congreve's private life. In 1696 (December 12, 1695 ^),
^ " London Gazette."
COKGREVE, VS ^, o 79
Dennis published a little volume of Letters iipon several
Occasions^ a tolerably rich mine of little facts to the literary-
historian of the age. This book consisted of letters
written to Dennis by Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, and
Walter Moyle, with the replies of Dennis.
At this time Dennis was about forty years of age. His
characteristic violence of temper, ending in his stabbing
a fellow-commoner of Caius, had cut short his promising
academic life at Cambridge. After long wandering over
the face of Europe, he had made his entry into London
life about the same time as Congreve himself, though at
an age much more advanced. He had some wealth, lavish
extravagance, and a restless ambition; he published copies
of verses, satires, criticisms, and had ready for performance
one comedy at least. The volume of which we are speak-
ing shows that he claimed the acquaintance of the first
wits of the age, and that his claim was not rejected. He
dedicates his book to Charles Montague, with a promise
that that great man shall nowhere in it find himself out-
side the circle of his distinguished acquaintance. The
first letter in the book is addressed from his Cornwall
house, by Walter Moyle, to Congreve, and seems to give
an account of a lost poem by the latter : —
A humorous description of John Abassus, a nickname given to a
stupid Sussex squire, fond of plays and poems, who came up to
town, as he said, " to see the Poets of the Age," and was by some
of them introduced among the wits of Will's Coffee-house in Covent
Garden, among whom they admitted him, under the form of a
poetical consecration, as a member of their society.
This Consecration of Jolin Abassus seems to have been
80 LIFE OF
thrown away, as beneath the dignity of the Muse. To
regain it we would sacrifice all Congreve's solemn pas-
torals and perfunctory Pindarics. We gather from Moyle's
letter, which is dated October 7, 1695, that Wycherley at
this time took the chair at Will's Coffee-house, when he
was in town. It also begs Congreve to tell Moyle what
progress he has made with his tragedy, which shows that
The Mourning Bride was already partly written. The
letters were all of recent date when Dennis printed them.
The earliest communication from Congreve is an essay
on Humour in Comedy, sent to Dennis on the loth of
July, 1695. This essay treats a subject so interesting on
the lips of our greatest comic dramatist, that we may
examine it somewhat minutely.
Congreve begins by confessing that, in his opinion, the
English have not excelled in humour by any means so
universally as is usually supposed. He conceives that
what is often taken for humour should be described as
wit ; no doubt the dialogue in his own plays, which dis-
plays the very quintessence of wit, had often, to his
annoyance, been praised for its " humour." He con-
tinues : —
I have observed that when a few things have been wittily and
pleasantly spoken by any character in a comedy, it has been very
usual for those who make their remarks on a play, while it is acting,
to say " vSuch a thing is very humorously said, there is a great deal
'// of humour in that part. " Thus the character of the person speaking,
jj/ it may be, surprisingly and pleasantly, is mistaken for a character of
humour, which indeed is a character of wit.
He deals very severely with the ordinary so-called
comedies of the day, having, no doubt, in his mind
CONGREVE. 81
such follies as those to which Ravenscroft, D'Urfey, and
Settle were happy to sign their names, "stuffed," as Con-
greve puts it, " with grotesque figures and farce-fools."
The comedies of Shadwell, even, belonged to this
class, nor were Dryden and Southerne quite clean of this
pitch of redundant absurdity. Congreve demanded a far
higher ideal of comic literature : —
For my part, I am as willing to laugh as anybody, and as easily
diverted with an object truly ridiculous ; but, at the same time, I
never care for seeing things that force me to entertain low thoughts
of my nature. I don't know how it is with you, but I confess
freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey without very
mortifying reflections, though I never heard anything to the con-
trary why that creature is not originally of a distinct species. As I
do not think humour exclusive of wit, neither do I think it incon-
sistent with folly, but I think the follies should be only such as men's
humour may incline them to, and not follies entirely abstracted from
both humour and nature.
It is perhaps not too wild a guess to conjecture that in
this sarcastic description Congreve was pointing at The
Catiterbury Guests^ a miserable comedy by Ravenscroft,
which the Patentees of the Theatre Royal had just
brought out. With great critical acumen, he goes on to
distinguish certain classes of characteristics which are
commonly, and incorrectly, presented as matter of
humour. Personal defects, although Ben Jonson has
made use of them in The Fox, are not to be properly
introduced into comedy, nor external habit of body, nor,
without careful discrimination, even affectation, because
humour is a natural growth, and affectation the result of
industry. Congreve then passes to a particular and very
interesting review of humour as displayed in the great
6
82 LIFE OF
comedies of Jonson, and presently, not without an ex-
pression of diffidence, he advances a definition of humour,
which he "takes to be '"a singular and unavoidable
manner of doing or saying anything, peculiar and natural
to one man only, by which his speech and actions are
distinguished from those of other men.'' He is inclined
to deny it to women, or states, at least, that, so far as his
experience goes, " if ever anything does appear comical
•or ridiculous in a woman, I think it is little more than an
acquired folly." He then proceeds to remark that the
diversity of humour, to be noted in the human race,
might seem to afiford endless matter for the writing of
comedies. Yet it is not so, and only a very small selec-
tion of whimsical natures really lend themselves to
dramatic development. He closes with a defence of
English eccentricity, which is as true as it was two
hundred years ago : —
There is more of humour in our EngHsh comic writers than in any
other. I do not at all wonder at it, for I look upon humour to be
almost of English growth ; at least, it does not seem to have found
such increase on any other soil. And what appears to me to be the
reason of it is the great freedom, privilege, and liberty which the
common people of England enjoy. Any man that has a humour is
under no restraint or fear of giving it vent ; they have a proverb
among them which, may be, will show the bent and genius of the
people as well as a longer discourse, " He that will have a May-
pole, shall have a Maypole." This is, a maxim with them, and
their practice is agreeable to it. I believe something considerable
too may be ascribed to their feeding so much on flesh, and the gross-
ness of their diet in general. But let the physicians agree about
that.
On the 30th of j\Iay, 1695, Narcissus Luttrel notes
CONGREVE. 83
that " Mr. Chamock Heron, J^Ir. Clark and ]\Ir. Con-
greve, the poet, are made commissioners of the hackney-
coaches in the place of Mr. Ashurst, Mr. Overbury and
Mr. Isham, who resigned." The cause of the resignation
was that the salary of the office had been suddenly cut
down from;£'2oo a year to ;^ioo. For some time this
small post under Government appears to have been
the only such emolument given to the poet. Congreve
reminds us of the legendary Civil Servant who asked for
a week's holiday on the day he received his appointment,
in order to get used to the office, since he imme-
diately proceeded to Tunbridge Wells to drink steel for
an attack of the spleen. Though still in his twenty-sixth
year, he seems to have already sapped his constitution.
After both Moyle and Dennis have upbraided him for
his silence, at last, on the nth of August, he writes to
them from the Wells. He is not so fond of the country,
but that he would rather read a description of a land-
scape in town than see the real thing. A passage from
this letter is worth quoting : —
I wish for you very often, that I might recommend you to souie
new acquaintance that I have made here, and think very well worth
., the
dramatists] some language which must be resented by all
who profess humanity." But this was an appeal to a side
upon which the sensibilities of the Puritan critic were
impregnable.
Dennis undertakes a warm defence of Wycherley. Of
Congreve he does not say a word, partly, no doubt,
because Congreve was now supposed to be engaged on a
reply of his own. He divides his homily into three parts,
and endeavours to prove that the stage is useful in con-
ducing to the happiness of mankind, in supporting govern-
ment, and in assisting religion. He is little occupied in
defending particular plays or the conduct of the existing
dramatists, but he foresees the damage which will be done
to the stage in general if the contagion of Collier's Puri-
tanism spreads, and he warmly deprecates the exaggeration
which kills the patient in the endeavour or pretence to
cure him. This little book of Dennis is the most serious
of the crowed of replies which Collier's attack called
forth.
Two days after the publication of Dennis' Usefulness of
the Stage^^ there appeared A Short Vijidication of the
Relapse and the Provok'd Wife^ by the Autho?'. Scarcely
a year had elapsed, since this vigorous contributor to the
drama had first made his appearance, and he was already
the writer of three very successful plays. He had been
persistently anonymous, and_, his name was unknown to
the public. The buyer of the copy of A Short Vindica-
tion in my own collection has written " by Captain
Vanbrug" across the title-page, and this, rather than the
^ June Sth, '♦ Flying Post."
COAGREVE. 117
now customary " Vanborough," seems to have been the
current pronunciation of his name. John Vanbrugh was
four years Congreve's senior, and had taken up theatrical
interests at the age of thirty, after a wild life in the army.
His training, his reckless vehemence of animal spirits,
his soldierly habits, all prepared him to put the finishing
touch on the debauchery of the stage ; and it would be
idle to attempt to deny that Vanbrugh, who is one of the
merriest and most ingenious of comic writers, is also one
of the most ribald. The Relapse and the Provok'd Wife
had awakened Collier's extreme displeasure, and he was
more blind to the artistic merit of Vanbrugh than to that
of any other playwright. He had condemned him utterly
andscurrilously, and the town looked to the gallant captain
for a reply. The poet's first intention had been to take
no notice. His friends, " the righteous as well as the
unrighteous," assured him that the attack which Collier
had made was not likely to injure him, and persuaded
Vanbrugh to disdain it. But the sensation the Short
Vieiv had caused increased instead of passing away;
"'this lampoon,"' says Vanbrugh in June, "has got credit
•enough in some places to brand the persons it mentions "
with a bad reputation, and he thinks it " now a thing no
farther to be laughed at."
Vanbrugh does not answer with a very good grace,
for, indeed, he had not much to say. He makes a few
points. He is particularly happy in exposing Collier's
blunder in charging the poet with profanity for putting in
Lord Foppington's mouth expressions which, from the
lips of such a man, are plainly compliments to the Church
which he seems to attack. It is not less plain that the
113 LIFE OF
most dutiful comedian in the world need not blush to
have allowed a nurse to call an intriguing chaplain ^'a
wicked man." The use of such phrases as "thou angel
of light," " Providence takes care of men of merit," is
shown to be wholly conventional and innocent, and on
the last pages of his Short Vindication^ Vanbrugh takes
a certainly very unfortunate criticism of Collier's on a
passage in the Relapse^ and turns upon it with such an
impudent and happy adroitness, that he leaves his reader
in the best of humours, and his adversary superficially
discomfited.
Vanbrugh's reply, however, comes, on the whole, to
very little. It mollifies the wounds which A Short
View had made, it brushes off a little of the mud,
straightens a little the ruffled garments of the two out-
raged plays, makes the poet's personal position a little
more endurable, but does nothing whatever to disprove
on broad lines Collier's general indictment. Of any one
but himself, Vanbrugh judiciously says nothing, but
declares that he was helped in writing the Rdapse^ by
a gentleman who has " gone away with the Czar, who
has made him Poet Laureate of Muscovy." This state-
ment does not appear to have been noted by any writer
on Vanbrugh, nor am I able to conjecture what gentle-
man the poet alludes to.
Edward Filmer had been in so great a hurry to address
the public that he had not said half that he intended in
his first pamphlet. On the 23rd of June,' therefore, he
issued A Further Defence of Dramatic Poetry, a treatise
in the same aftected, alembicated style, which would be
' The "Post Boy."
COXGREVE. ll'J
totally without value did it not happen to contain this
interesting passage :
It goes for current authority round the whole town that Mr.
Dryden himself publicly declared [the Short Vz'ezu] unanswerable,
and thanked Mr. Collier for the just correction he had given him ;
and that Mr. Congreve and some other great authors had made
much the same declaration ; which is all so notoriously false, so
egregious a lie, that Mr. Dryden particularly always looked upon it
as a pile of malice, ill-nature, and uncharitableness, and all drawn
upon the rack of wit and invention.
Filmer is principally occupied in the Further Defence
with defending the Relapse^ his tract being evidently
written before Vanbrugh's Short Vindication appeared.
It was now grown to be four months since Collier had
put his ram's horn to his lips. Instead of dying away,
the echoes had gathered volume, and the play-houses
were ringing with them. The only successful new play
of the season had been Catharine Trotter's Fatal Friend-
ships in which great decorum and modesty of speech
had been preserved. Betterton and Mrs. Bracegirdle
had been ftned for profane language. Narcissus Luttrel
tells us that on May 12, 1698, "The Justices of
Middlesex did not only prosecute the play-houses, but
also ]Mr. Congreve for writing the Double Dealer^
D'Urfey for Don Quixote^ and Tonson and Erisco,
booksellers, for printing them ; and that women fre-
quenting the play-houses in masks tended much to
debauchery and immorality." The theatres were awed,
at all events for the moment; play-goers had a novel
sense of the awakening conscience. But the desire
to hear what the leaders of dramatic literature had to
120 LIFE OF
say was extreme, and this curiosity centred around
Congrevc, whose position at Lincoln's Inn Theatre, as
well as his rank as a poet, made him, rather than the
retired Dryden, the playwright of the age par excellence.
Long obstinately silent, the author of Love for Love gave
way at last, not because he had anything to say, but
because public opinion obliged him to reply. He
relinquished his stronghold of disdainful silence, and not
having answered at once, he had the want of tact to
reply when temper had become acerbated, when interest
was dulled^ and when the obvious repartees had been
already made by less witty men. All eyes were upon
him, he strained his powers to the full, and he collapsed
in a failure which is distressing to contemplate after
«iearly two hundred years. Congreve was incomparably
we know little in detail. It was no great matter ; it was
i^ierely the Monsieii7' de Poiirceaiignac of Moliere, but it
has caused a certain amount of bibliographical mystifica-
tion. Vanbrugh, Congreve, and Walsh set to work to
translate, or rather, probably, to adapt, Moliere's farce ;
each took one act, and the piece was finished in two morn-
ings. As Congreve says : " It was a compliment made to
the people of quality at their subscription music, without
any design to have it acted or printed further. It made
people laugh, and somebody thought it worth his while
to translate it again, and print it as it was acted ; but if
you meet such a thing, I assure you it was none of ours."
The "thing" exists in the form of a rare quarto entitled
Mofisieur de Pourceaugnac^ or Squire Tirlooby, published
on the 19th of April, 1704. In the preface to this play
the translator says that he had completed and designed
it for the English stage, *'had he not been prevented by
CONG RE VE. 149
a translation of the same play done by other hands, and
presented at the New Play-House the 30th of last month.
When I was told the great names concerned in the exhibit-
ing of it to so glorious an assembly, and saw what choice
was made of the comedians, ... I presently resolved
upon the publication of it." He goes on to say that the
Congreve version was incomplete, and omitted two
long scenes ; and tells us that, although the farce proved
highly popular, and was much called for in book form^
the authors obstinately refused to print it, some scandal
having been caused by its performance, " some thinking
it was a party-play made on purpose to ridicule the whole
body of West-country gentlemen, others averring that it
was wrote to expose some eminent doctors of physic in
this town."
All this seems clear enough, but there remain difficul-
ties. Vanbrugh, Congreve, and Walsh called their farce
Squire Trelooby ; so does the anonymous translator, who
brings the hero, as they did, from Cornwall. Pourceaug-
nac in the original comes from Limoges, but there is
nothing in that to suggest to two independent minds Tre-
looby and Cornwall. Moreover, the printed play gives
the prologue written by Garth and the epilogue spoken
by Mrs. Bracegirdle. Now that the former piece was
actually spoken seems to be proved by the fact that one
couplet in it —
But if to-day some scandal should appear,
Let those precise Tartuffes bind o'er Moliere —
is elsewhere quoted from memory as having been spoken
on the occasion of the 30th of March. Mrs. Bracegirdle's
150 LIFE OF
epilogue is anonymous, but it is evidently from the hand
of Congreve. It contains such admirably characteristic
lines as these : —
The World by this important project sees
Confederates can dispatch if once they please,
(referring to the speed with which the three confederated
wits had completed their task)
They show you here what ills attend a life,
And all for that vexatious whim, a wife,
What world of woes a wretched wight surround.
By bantlings baited, and by duns dragooned.
By bullies bastinadoed, teased by cracks.
Wheedled by rooks and massacred by quacks.
The bill of the actors' names, too, is the genuine one, and
it seems not at all certain, in spite of Congreve's cautious
letter to Keally, that this Squire Treloohy of 1704 does
not virtually represent the play which the joint authors
thought it wise to disown. The mystification does not
end here. In 1734, w^hen all the persons concerned
were dead, Ralph edited and produced at Drury Lane a
comedy of The Cornish Squire^ which he professed to
have discovered in the MS. of Vanbrugh, Congreve, and
"Walsh, and to have altered in various respects. This
differs from the Squire Treloohy of 1704. Ozell trans-
lated Monsieur de Pourceaugnac^ but his version is sup-
posed to have never been printed. It is possible that
what Ralph published under the three more eminent
names is really Ozell's version.
Squire Treloohy was very popular. It was first played
CONGREVE. 151
on the 30th of March, with "subscription music," by
select comedians from both houses. On tlie 23rd of
May it was acted again for "our neighbour" Mrs.
Bracegirdle's benefit, and for Mrs. Leigh's benefit on
the 6th of June. On the 28th of January, 1706, it was
revived as a new piece under Congreve and Van-
brugh's direction. To close this not very important
episode, it may be added that the printed version of the
play was attributed to Garth, which, if true, would
account for the technical accuracy of the long medical
dialogue at the close of the first act. We can imagine
the three poets appealing to their friend, the author of
The Dispensary^ and declaring that this scene, being
beyond their power, "ne demande pas raoins qu'un
Esculape comme vous, consomme dans votre art."
On the ist of June, 1704, Mrs. Bowman had a benefit
of Love for Love^ for which Congreve wrote a new pro-
logue and a song called "The Misses' Lamentation," in
which the ladies deplored their inability to come any
longer to first-night performances in vizard masks. This
abuse, in fact, had been put a stop to by an edict of
Queen Anne, of the 17th of January, 1704, which
tightened the cords of discipline about the necks of the
theatres in several directions. The reformation of the
stage, so courageously started by Collier, was now rapidly
developing, in answer to a public demand for cleanliness
and sobriety. Congreve during this month was severely
punished by the gout, and it is nov; that we hear for the
first time of his going to Bath for the waters. In
October we get a slight glimpse of him in a letter to
Keally : —
152 LIFE OF
I have a multitude of affairs, having just come to town after nine
weeks' absence. I am grown fat, but you know I was born with
somewhat of a round belly. . . . Think of me as I am, nothing ex-
tenuate. My service to Robin, who would laugh to see me puzzled
to buckle my shoe, but I'll fetch it down again.
These read like the playful confessions of an obese but
green old age ; the writer was only thirty-four years of age
at the time. In the same month, after having lost sight
of Swift out of Congreve's intimacy since the two men
were youths fresh from Ireland, we find chronicled the
publication of the Tale of a Tub. It is curious to note
that Congreve, the younger of the two, had now practically
completed his career, and was resting on his laurels,
while the elder was making his first important essay in
publicity. Keally has not liked Swift's satire, but finds
himself, as far as Dublin is concerned, alone in his want
of enthusiasm. The cautious and comfortable Congreve
has found his old friend's satire equally distasteful : —
I am of your mind as to the Tale of a Tub. I am not alone in
the opinion, as you are there ; but I am pretty near it, having but
very few on my side, but those few are worth a million. However,
I have never spoke my sentiments, not caring to contradict a multi-
tude. Bottom ^ admires it, and cannot bear my saying I confess I
was diverted with several passages when I read it, but I should not
care to read it again. That he thinks not commendation enough.
About this time, very unfortunately for us, there comes
a break of a year and a half in the Keally correspondence.
' So printed in the Berkeley correspondence ; but, appropriate as
the name may seem as describing the ordinary appraiser of litera-
ture, it is perhaps more likely that on this occasion Congreve wrote
"Bctterton."
COXGREVE. 153
But the year 1705 is precisely that in which we should
have particularly chosen, had it been possible, to see
what our hero was doing. It was a year of return, in
measure, to the publicity of theatrical life. In the winter
of 1704 Vanbrugh had become manager of Lincoln's Inn
Fields Theatre, and on the 9th of April, 1705, the same
poet opened the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket
under the joint management of Congreve and himself.^
An Italian Pastoral, The Triumph of Love, was the first
piece produced, and Mrs. Bracegirdle pronounced an
epilogue specially composed by Congreve for the occa-
sion. It promised that the bucolic sweetness of the
opening night should not too often be repeated : —
In sweet Italian strains cur shepherds sing,
Of harmless loves our painted forests ring
In notes, perhaps less foreign than the thing.
To sound and show at first we make pretence ;
In time we may regale you with some sense,
But that, at present, were too great expense ;
and it ended with what sounds very much like a predic-
tion of a new comedy by Vanbrugh, a declaration that
they would soon
Paint the reverse of what you've seen to-day,
And in bold strokes the vicious world display.
^ It does not seem certain that Congreve had hitherto entirely
relinquished his share of theatrical management at the other house.
In Mr. W. R. Baker's collection of MSS. there is a note from W.
Davenant to Tonson, dated from Frankfort, April 20, 1702, in
which he says : " Pray give my service to Mr. Congreve and desire
him to let me be remembered in the dressing-room at Lincoln's Inn
Fields."
154 LIFE OF
This, no doubt, referred to that admirable piece. The
Confederacy. Congreve is said to have had a share in
the new theatre, a share which he rehnquished, together
with his management, before many months were over.
On the 25th of June, 1705, a novel experiment was
^ tried at the Haymarket theatre, a performance of Love
for Love, in which all the parts were acted by women.
But about this time Congreve's eyesight began to be
troublesome ; it was a symptom of the general gout
which ran through his system. This, there is no ques-
^ tion, was the final cause of his retirement from theatrical
enterprise. A man crippled by obesity, and threatened
with blindness, could undertake no stage-management
with any hope of success. In December, 1705, he
received a post of very considerable emolument, that of
/ Commissioner of Wine Licenses, and it is now, for the
first time, that we can with any confidence think of Con-
greve as a rich man. " The greater part of the last
twenty years of his life," we are told, '' was spent in ease
and retirement," and although it was not until 171 1 that
he really became wealthy, he must now, with his Hackney
Coaches and his Wines, his little patrimony and the
revenue of his five plays, have been more than comfort-
ably provided for.
Two occasional poems belong to the year 1705. One
is The Tears of Amaryllis, an idyl on the death of the
Marquis of Blandford, published in June.' It is in the
^ On the 1st of July, 1705, Congreve wrote to Jacob Tonson in
Amsterdam : " Your nephew told me of copies that were dispersed
of the Pastoral, and likely to be printed, so we have thought fit to
prevent 'em and print it ourselves." — From a note in !Mr. W. R. Baker's
collection of MSS.
CONGREVE. 155
most inflated style of rococo pastoral, adorned with all the
customary accessories of rural Enghsh landscape, such as
tigers and wolves, nymphs and sylvan gods, weeping gums
and purple buds and myrtle chaplets. The mother of the
young gentleman v/eeps, and the consequence is that
Nature herself attentive silence kept,
And motion seemed suspended while she wept.
It is written, in a wholly false taste, to a Dresden china
ideal, but the couplets rush on with a fluent and almost
unctuous ease, such as no one else achieved until Pope
began to write. If the substance of these occasional poems
of Congreve's had been even tolerably real or decently
weighty, the curious poUsh of the form would have saved
them. But they were as empty as so many iridescent
bubbles.
The other poem of 1705 is occasional also, but this
is of far greater merit. The Ode on Mrs. Arabella
Hunt Singing is one of Congreve's genuine successes.
It is a false Pindaric, it is deformed by hideous and ludi-
crous conceits, but it contains, in its descriptions of the
effect of great music on a sympathetic listener, some of
the most ingenious interpretations which this situation has
called forth : — •
Let all be hushed, each softest motion cease,
Be every loud tumultuous thought at peace,
And every ruder gasp of breath
Be calm, as in the arms of death,
And thou, most fickle, most uneasy part,
Thou restless wanderer, my heart,
Be still ! gently, ah ! gently leave,
Thou busy, idle thing, to heave !
156 LIFE OF
Stir not a pulse ! and let my blood,
That turbulent, unruly flood,
Be softly stayed.
Let me be, all but my attention, dead.
Go, rest, unnecessary springs of life.
Leave your officious toil and strife,
For I would hear her voice, and try
If it be possible to die.
It has been noticed that the two last lines of the
Ode on Mrs. Arabella Hunt Singing seem to have had
the honour of haunting the ear of Keats. Congreve
writes —
Wishing for ever in that state to lie.
For ever to be dying so, yet never die;
while one draft of Keats' last sonnet closes with the
couplet —
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath.
And so live ever, or else swoon to death.
Arabella Hunt, who was the most distinguished voca-
list of her age, and also a very accomplished performer
on the lute, died in December of this same year, 1705.
Congreve improvised the following quatrain on the occa-
sion : —
Were there on earth another Voice like thine,
Another Hand so blessed with skill divine.
The late-afflicted world some hopes might have,
And harmony retrieve thee from the grave.
Few things would be more interesting than to recover
a series of intimate memoirs, or a collection of unpub-
COAGREJ^E. 157
lished letters, throwing light on the theatrical life of
London during the first decade of the eighteenth century.
During this period the theatre underwent revolution
upon revolution ; still flourishing in appearance, with
dolphin-colours, English drama of the literary class was
just about to expire, and the modern forms of stage-
entertainment were taking its place. Experiment after
experiment was tried to win back the exhausted sym-
pathies of the public, and it is precisely at this juncture,
when positive information would be so extremely valu-
able, that we have to fall back upon a few careless pages
of Colley Gibber, some casual references in the news-
papers, which now first begin to notice the stage, and
one or two passing allusions in the correspondence of
the day. It appears that the first result of opening the
Haymarket theatre had been to exceed the demand for
theatrical amusement, and it became impossible to fill
all the houses with spectators. The famous school of
actors which had risen to its height under William III.
had grown old without being strengthened by the
accession of adequate youthful talent. Most of the
great names that appear on the bills of Congreve's first
comedies had now passed out of existence. Betterton
himself was over seventy, and yet, old as he was, he had
no competitor to fear among the new generation of
actors. As Colley Gibber rather pathetically says, in
1706 "these remains of the best set of actors, that
I believe were ever known at once in England, by time,
death, and the satiety of their hearers, had mouldered
to decay."
In April Gongreve writes that there is to be a union
158 LIFE OF
of the two houses. Nothing else, it was believed, could
recover the sinking prestige of English drama. It was
to the advantage of Sir John Vanbrugh that the overtures
should come from Drury Lane; but the curious tricks
that were played upon him, and the ingenuities of
Swiney, are familiar, so far as anything so very mys-
terious and cryptic can be said to be familiar, to readers
of the Apology. Congreve seems to have thrown up his
share in the management soon after, if not upon, the
secret union of the houses, and the spring of 1706 was
fraught with great vexation to him. In the autumn of
this same year we hear that "the play-houses have
undergone another revolution," and that Vanbrugh also
has resigned his authority to Swiney. This marks Con-
greve's final retirement from public life; he becomes
an official pluralist, a gentleman of leisure, an immortal
raised upon a species of pedestal, serene above the clash
of the living Hterary world. From this time forth, con-
tent to be recognized as the first poet of the past age, he
descends no more into the arena of practical competition.
He still retained his scholarship and his love of letters,
and to the autumn of 1706 belongs a very creditable
publication A Pindaric Ode to the Quee/i, with a Discourse
on the Pindaric Ode, The Discourse is in prose, and is
a real contribution to criticism. For half a century
English literature had been overrun, as by a noisome
parasitic w^eed, by the false ode of Pindar as it had
revealed itself to Cowley in his hasty study of that poet
during his exile in Paris. IMisconceiving the form of
Pindar, and seeing in the elaborate metrical system of
that master of technical lyric nothing but an amorphou s
CONGREVE. 159
chain of longs and shorts, cut up into irregular lengths '
according to the licentious fancy of the poet, Cowley
had introduced the horrid kind of ode which delighted
the formlessness of the Restoration. Congreve, as we
have seen, had known no better than to swell this flood
of titular " Pindaricks." But he had now, in his leisure,
been reading Pindar, and the error of Cowley became
patent to him. He saw that "the character of these
late pindarics is a bundle of rambhng incoherent
thoughts, expressed in a like parcel of irregular stanzas,
which also consist of such another complication of
disproportioned, uncertain, and perplexed verses and
rhymes." He had made a great discovery, and he pro-
ceeded to show what the form of a real ode of Pindar
is, with its strophe, antistrophe, and epode, a thing as
different from Cowley's " horrid or ridiculous caricatures"
as a crystal is from a jelly-fish. His essay is brief, but
singularly direct and complete, and places him high
among the critics of the age. It is rare, indeed, at that
period, to find a question of literary workmanship treated
simply from the technical point of view, and not obscured
by the vain phraseology of the Jesuits. Congreve's
appeal to the English poets to return to the pure Greek
form of ode was presently recognized by all the best
writers, and in particular the two great odes of Gray
show how scrupulously faithful that learned lyrist was
in his discipleship of Pindar. The pseudo-pindarics
went on being written, and are not, indeed, to this day,
wholly abandoned by writers who ought to know better,
but from 1706 onwards these deformities have been
obliged to confess themselves " irregular."
IGO LIFE OF
Congrcvc exemplified his theory of Greek ode-form
in two elaborate odes to Queen Anne and to Godolphin.
Unfortunately, correctness of technique does not ensure
inspiration, and these carefully modulated poems lack the
charm of great lyric verse. They are principally interest-
ing as showing, once more, what has hitherto I think
been ignored, the influence which Congreve exercised,
by his more ambitious lyrical flights, on William Collins.
The address to Calliope in the Ode to Queen Mary
is remarkably like the "Passions," as like as clay can
be to marble. But when the poet proceeds to flatter
Queen Anne, and, in a blustering epode, to heap adula-
tions upon Marlborough, there is no longer even an
earthy likeness to the later and nobler bard. The Ode
to Godolphin makes a brave attempt to emulate the
splendour and melody of Pindar, with direct imitation
of the celebration by that poet of the Olympic con-
querors. But it is to be feared that to Congreve will
scarcely be awarded the olive garland in this race
with his intrepid forerunner. Scholarship, smoothness
of versification, laborious zeal, all these he possesses ;
but sincerity, the heavenly spark of style, of imagination,
these have not descended upon Congreve in his odes.
The Discourse on the Pitidaric Ode^ with its attendant
strophes, appeared late in 1706, as a folio pamphlet.
On the 13th of October, 1707, Congreve ceased to
be a Commissioner for Licensing" Hackney Coaches,
apparently without receiving, for the present, any equiva-
lent of a difl'erent nature. This is doubtless " my loss,"
at which he thanks Keally for expressing a cordial
sympathy. In the same letter (May 12, 170S) he speaks
CONGREVE. IGl
of receiving a legacy of ;^iooo. His health was very
poor; "I am pretty well recovered," he says, "of a
very severe fit, which has lasted a month. I think to
go abroad for air to-morrow." In a letter of about
the same time he uses a pleasant phrase that has now
an old-world sound about it ; " everybody," he tells
Keally, "is your servant, but the old gentlewoman is
gone to God." From Steele we learn that Congreve
was at Newmarket in October, and back in town, laid
up with the gout, in November, 1708. On the 7th of
April, 1709, " by the desire of several persons of quality," /
Love for Love was played for Betterton's benefit, and
Mrs. Bracegirdle, who had practically quitted the stage,
came back to play Angelica. This famous performance
is described in a well-known Tatle?', In April of the
next year the venerable Betterton passed away, and with ^
him died the dramatic tradition of the seventeenth
century. At this point the meagre correspondence of
Congreve with Keally overlaps the notices of the former
which begin to appear in Swift's letters, and for the
future what brief and unsatisfactory ghmpses we get of
Congreve are mainly given through the medium of
Swift. It was in the year 1708 that Congreve became J
acquainted with Pope, not yet of age, and read with
benignant interest the MS. of the Pastorals. An old
friend of his, William Walsh, who had also been a wise
patron of that young poet, passed away in the same
year.
The Journal to Stella is now our principal source of
personal detail regarding Congreve. On the 26th of
October, 17 10, Swift writes as follows : —
162 LIFE OF
I was to-day to see Mr. Congrevc, who is almost blind with
cataracts growing on his eyes ; and his case is, that he must wait
two or three years, until the cataracts are riper, and till he is quite
blind, and then he must have them couched ; and besides he is
never rid of the gout, yet he looks young and fresh, and is as
cheerful as ever. He is younger by three years or more ^ than I,
and I am twenty years younger than he. He gave me a pain in
the great toe, by mentioning the gout.
Next day he joined Congreve and some other friends
over a bowl of bad punch in " a blind tavern." They
eschewed the punch, but Sir Richard Temple sent for
six flasks of his own wine, and the party sat drinking
till midnight. Ten days later, Swift dined with Con-
greve and Vanbrugh at Sir Richard Temple's, when the
latter poet was " very civil and cold " about the too-
famous goose-pie verses. All this winter of 1710 Con-
greve turns up ever and anon in the journal to Stella^
though seldom in any very graphic or characteristic way.
Steele and Prior, Rowe and Addison, appear among his
habitual companions, haunting the same taverns and
coffee-houses, while Lady ]Mary Wortley ^Montagu is
henceforward among his intimates.
In December, 17 10, Tonson published the Woj'ks
of Congreve in three volumes, adding, what was now
for the first time printed, the opera of Seniele, a
long-drawn insipidity in three acts. Whether this
lyrical piece was ever acted or no appears to be
uncertain; it had not enjoyed that distinction when
it was pubhshed, although John Eccles, and after-
" Swift, as an old Dublin friend, knew better than the gossips.
Congreve was, as we now know, three years and two months S^-ift's
junior.
CONGREVE. 163
wards Handel composed music for it. There appears
to have been a quarrel, or difference of opinion, between
Congreve and his publisher, Jacob Tonson, with regard
to the manner in which the Works of the former were
produced/ Rowe indited an amusing eclogue called
The Reconciliation betiveeii Jacob Tonson and Mr. Congreve,
in which the publisher tells the poet that he cannot
exist without him, and offers to set him up a bed in
his dining-room, if only he will let byegones be bye-
gones, and dine once more at the printing-office in
Bow Street. Congreve is represented as extremely suave
and conciliatory under this pathetic appeal.
On the 13th of February, 171 1, Swift tells Stella that
Congreve has been very ill with the gout, but that,
" blind as he is," he has kindly written out a contribution
for the benefit of Harrison, Swift's promising young pro-
tege. This was a little heraldic story, which appeared in
the Tailer as well as in Harrison's Miscellany. Three
days later Swift was dining with Congreve and with
Estcourt, the author of The Fair Example. He laughed
for hours in their company, but notes that " Congreve's
nasty white wine has given me the heartburn." On the
22nd of June there is a very important entry about Con-
^ The following document, not I think before printed, is found
among the Tonson jNISS. in the British INIuseum : —
Jime i^th, 1 7 10.
I promise to pay to Mr. Congreve or his order the sum of twenty-
guineas whenever his vollume of poems which I am now printing
shall come to be reprinted and at any time he shall demand give
him an account what part of this Impression are disposed of.
Witness my hand
Jacob Tonson, Senr.
1G4 LIFE OF
greve, which appears to have escaped the notice of
those who have written about his opulence, and his
absolute superiority to the common misfortunes of the
poetic race : —
I saw Will Congrcfc attending at the Treasury, by order, with
his brethren, the Commissioners of the Wine Licences. I had often
mentioned him with kindness to the Lord Treasurer ; and Congreve
told me, that, after they had answered to what they were sent for,
my lord called him privately, and spoke to him with great kindness,
promising his protection, etc. The poor man said he had been
used so ill of late years, he was quite astonished at my lord's good-
ness, etc., and desired me to tell my lord so; which I did this
evening, and recommended him heartily. My lord assured me he
esteemed him very much, and would always be kind to him ; that
what he said was to make Congreve easy, because he knew people
talked as if his lordship designed to turn everybody out, and par-
ticularly Congreve ; which indeed was true, for the poor man told
me he apprehended it. As I left my lord Treasurer I called on
Congreve, (knowing where he dined), and told him what had
passed between my lord and me : so I have made a worthy man
easy, and that is a good day's work.
Swift tells us elsewhere that when Halifax, on leaving
office, recommended Congreve to the generous offices
of the Tories, Harley responded with a Virgilian
couplet : —
Non obtusa adeo gestamus pectora Poeni,
Nee tam aversus equos Tyria sol jungit ab urbi.
According to Swift the Tories always treated Congreve
well. There was no author of the age whose political
views were less emphatic, or who less belonged to a
party than Congreve. The '" unreproachful man," as
Gay called him, would nevertheless remember that he
CONGREVE, 165
owed his post to Halifax, and tremble. Swift, in the verses
on Dr. Delany, seems to charge Congreve with pretending
to be zealous in politics to save his bread. Let us hope
that it was not so, nor be too censorious if it was. Eng-
land could surely spare a sinecure or two to the author
of The Way of the World. Swift's assiduites on behalf
of his Whig literary friends illustrate one of the most
charming and sympathetic traits in his character.
Congreve's health grew worse and worse. On the 5th
of January, 17 12, Swift finds him in his lodgings almost
blind, and a French physician tampering with one of his
eyes. In the spring there was a change in his office,
of which he vaguely speaks to Keally, and he gave up
those lodgings in Arundel Street in which he had lived so
long, to go into a better house in Surrey Street. During
the last year there is nothing about Congreve in the
Journal to Stella, and early in the summer of 1 7 1 3 that
priceless compendium of gossip comes to an end. From
this time forth Congreve became more and more shadowy,
and the events of the last fifteen years of his life can be
very briefly recorded. In November, 17 14, he ceased to
be one of the Commissioners of Wine Licences, but on the
14th of that month he received a more lucrative post,
that of one of the Searchers of Customs. To this was
added, on the 17th of December following, the appoint-
ment of Secretary of Jamaica, and Congreve was now a
rich man, the salaries of these offices amounting, it is said,
to ;£ 1, 2 00 a year. In May of the next year his old
friend and patron Halifax died.
In 1 7 1 7, Congreve dedicated the duodecimo edition of
Dryden's Flays to Thomas Pelham, Duke of Newcastle,
/
^
166 LIFE OF
a handsome if perhaps a somewhat tardy payment of his
debt of affection to the great poet who had loved him
so generously in his youth. His own condition is re-
flected in 1 7 19 in the Duke of Buckingham's (Mul-
grave's) Election of a Poet Laureate^ where we read : —
Lame Congreve, unable such things to endure,
Of Apollo begged either a crown or a cure ;
To refuse such a writer, Apollo was loath,
And almost inclined to have given him both.
It was in this year that Congreve gave to Giles Jacob,
the gossipy lawyer, those brief notes about his own life
which appear in Jacob's Poetical Register of 17 19 and
1720, and which have formed the nucleus of all succeed-
ing biographies of Congreve. It is much to be wished
that these had been fuller, or that Giles Jacob, who lived
until 1744, had given us a completer version after Con-
greve's death. But although the poet was already
regarded as a classic, and even as manifestly the leading
man of letters in England, his personal life and manner
seem to have excited no curiosity whatever.
Early in 1720, Dennis, now hopelessly embroiled with
most of the writers of the day, assures us that he still enjoys
Congreve's friendship, and on the 25th of March of the
same year Pope paid the invalided dramatist the splendid
compliment of dedicating his Iliad to him. "Instead,"
said the young Apollo of the new school, "of endeavour-
ing to raise a vain monument to myself, let me leave
behind me a memorial of my friendship with one of the
most valuable men, as well as finest writers, of my age
and country, one who has tried, and knows by ex-
COXGREVE. 1G7
perience, how hard an undertaking it is to do justice to
Homer, and one who, I am sure, sincerely rejoices with
me at the period of my labours." Pope showed his tact,
perhaps, by selecting as the recipient of this extraordinary
compliment one who was identified less than any other
prominent person in England with political faction. But
it is not needful to exaggerate this cleverness ; there is no
doubt that Pope, to whom real literary excellence was
always interesting, enjoyed this opportunity of giving to a
poet of an elder generation what any duke or minister in
the land would have been eager to accept.
A curious note from Pope to Dennis, dated May 3rd,
1 72 1, shows that Congreve laboured to bring these two
antagonists into friendly relations, Dennis having suggested
Mr. Congreve's lodgings as a suitable meeting-place for
Pope and himself. On the nth of September, Pope,
writing to Gay, bids him " put Mr. Congreve in mind
that he has one on this side of the world who loves him,
and that there are more men and women in the universe
than Mr. Gay and my Lady Duchess. There are ladies
in and about Richmond who pretend to value him." All
the glimpses we get of Congreve, for the future, are taken
from the correspondence of his friends, among whom we
may enumerate all the principal wits of the age of Anne.
On the 3rd of February, 1723, Gay wrote as follows to
Swift : —
Mr. Congreve I see often. He always mentions you with the
strongest expressions of esteem and friendship. He labours still
under the same afflictions as to his sight and gout ; but, in his
intervals of health, he has not lost anything of his cheerful temper.
I passed all last season with him at the Bath, and I have great
108 LIFE OF
reason to value myself upon his friendship, for I am sure he
sincerely wishes me well. We pleased ourselves with the thoughts
of seeing you there.
On the 23rd of September of the same year, Swift
saj'S, in writing to Pope : —
You must remember me with great affection to Dr. Arbuthnot,
Mr. Congreve, and Gay. I think there are no more eodem tertios
between you and me, except Mr. Jervas [the portrait painter].
About this time the friends write anxiously to one
another for news of Congreve, whose constitution was
now beginning to sink under these repeated attacks of
the gout. On the 26th of February, 1725, he made his
will, leaving the bulk of his property to Henrietta,
Duchess of Marlborough, within whose influence he was
now completely captivated. To the scandal of posterity,
he left only ;^20o to Mrs. Bracegirdle, a proof, it
is certain, that her former ascendency over him was now
at an end. Just as Pope, Newton, and Swift exercised
the gossip of their contemporaries and successors by
legends of their secret nuptials, so it did not fail to be
whispered that Congreve had married Mrs. Bracegirdle.
That such was the fact is highly improbable. This will
of 1725 contains various bequests which, in a subsequent
codicil during his last illness, Congreve cancelled, mainly,
it would seem, to swell the needless additions to the for-
tune of the Duchess.
Not Mrs. Blimber merely, but every lover of letters
might wish to have been admitted, behind a curtain, to
the dinner of five at Twickenham, on the 7th of July,
1726, when Pope entertained Congreve, Bolingbroke,
CONGREVE. 169
Gay, and Swift. About this time the inseparable com-
panionship of Congreve and the Duchess became matter
of universal comment. Pope writes in the autumn, " Mr.
Congreve is too sick to brave a thin air, and she that
leads him too rich to enjoy anything." On the 20th of
September, 1726, Arbuthnot says that he has spent three
weeks at the house of the Duchess of Marlborough,
attending on Congreve, who has been like to die with a
fever and the gout in his stomach, but is now convales-
cent again. During this dangerous illness he was well
attended by his friends \ Swift was constantly solicitous,
and Pope went down to Windsor Park every other day to
visit him. A year later, we find Swift writing to Pope : —
Pray God continue and increase Mr. Congreve's amendment,
though he does not deserve it like you, having been too lavish of
that health which nature gave him.
By a not unprecedented phenomenon, just as the long-
smouldering ashes of Congreve's poetry were about to be
finally extinguished, a flame shot up from them. Accord-
ing to the anonymous author of the pamphlet, Cobham
and Cojigreve, published in 1730, the Epistle to Lord
Cobham was written shortly before Congreve died. Sir
Richard Temple, for that was Lord Cobham's name
before he was ennobled, had been one of the poet's
dearest friends from his earHest youth. An epistle '' Of
Pleasing," w^hich Congreve addressed him about 1700,
speaks to him even then,
As to one perfect in the pleasing art,
If art it may be called in you, who seem
By nature formed for love and for esteem.
170 LIFE OF
He was for nearly thirty years the most constant of Con-
greve's male companions, and the most beloved of his
friends. To him, then, probably in 1728, Congreve
addressed the " Epistle of Improving the Present Time,"
perhaps the most graceful and the most happily turned
of all his occasional pieces. He calls Cobham the
'* sincerest critic of my prose and rhyme ; " and the
reader of Pope's Moral Essays will remember how
exquisite was the taste and how full the experience of
this charming friend of poets. The epistle, which with
its Pagan optimism troubled and irritated Swift even
while he could not but praise its poetry, closes with this
personal appeal : —
Come see thy friend, retired without regret,
Forgetting care, or striving to forget,
In easy contemplation soothing time,
With morals much, and now and then with rhyme ;
Not so robust in body as in mind,
And always undejected, tho' declined ;
Not wondering at the world's new wicked ways,
Compared with those of our forefathers' days,
For virtue now is neither more nor less,
And vice is only varied in the dress.
Believe it, men have ever been the same,
And Ovid's Golden Age is but a dream.
This equable fragment of Congreve's philosophy was
printed by Curll in 1729, as soon as possible after the
poet's death.
The end was now approaching. In the early spring of
1728, Congreve went down to Bath with Gay and the
Duchess of Marlborough, and during the summer and
CONGREVE. 171
autumn, Gay, who remained at Bath, sends bulletins and
messages from Congreve to Pope and Swift. It was on
his return from this long visit to Bath, in the autumn of
1 7 28, that Congreve's coach was upset, and he, in his
helpless condition, severely injured. He did not succumb
at once to this accident, but continuing to complain of a
pain in his side, gradually grew weaker, and passed away
in his house in Surrey Street, Strand, at five o'clock on
Sunday morning, the 19th of January, 1729, wanting
three weeks of the completion of his fifty-ninth year.
On the following Sunday, between nine and ten in the
evening, after his body had lain in state in Jerusalem
Chamber, it was carried with great pomp into King
Henry the Seventh's chapel, and then, after the funeral
service was over, was buried in the Abbey. The pall
was carried by the Duke of Bridgewater, the Earl of
Godolphin (who represented his wife, the Duchess of
Marlborough), Lord Cobham, and Lord Wilmington.
It is understood that the Duchess of Marlborough
profited from the loss of her witty and easy-going friend
to the amount of ^10,000. She was in no want of
money ; she had already more than she could waste, but
she deserves a mild sort of credit for spending some of
Congreve's bequest in his honour. She placed in West-
minster Abbey the marble tablet on which may still be
read the inscription which follows : —
Mr. William Congreve died Jan. the 19th, 1728 [old style], aged
fifty-six \sic\ and was buried near this place ; to whose most valu-
able memory this monument is set up by Henrietta, Duchess of
Marlborough, as a mark how deeply she remembers the happiness
and honour she enjoyed in the sincere friendship of so worthy and
172 LIFE OF
honest a man, whose virtue, candour, and wit gained him the love
and esteem of the present age, and whose writings will be the
admiration of the future.
Her mother, the old Duchess, the formidable Sarah,
came to read this epitaph, and turning away made a cruel
misquotation, — " I know not what 'pleasure' she might
have had in his company, but I am sure it was no
'■ honour.' " It seems that the young Duchess was almost
crazy in her devotion to the poet's memory. She had a
figure made, according to one account an ivory automaton,
according to others a waxen statue, hfe-size, and exactly
hke him, which sat in Congreve's clothes at her table,
and was so contrived as to nod mechanically when she
spoke to it. Her enmii went to such lengths that she
had the feet of this figure wrapped in cloths, as
poor Congreve's gouty feet had been, while a physician
attended on the statue, and pretended to diagnose its
daily condition. The Duchess showed Young, the poet,
a diamond necklace, on which she spent seven thousand
pounds, all that remained of Congreve's bequest after
she had indulged in these Tussaud-like vagaries. Well
might the author of the Night Thoughts exclaim, "How
much better would it have been for Congreve to have
given the money to poor Mrs. Bracegirdle ! " Leigh
Hunt somewhat cynically suggested that the legacy to the
Duchess was intended to pay for all the dinners he had
eaten and the wine he had drunk at her expense.
Congreve was deeply regretted by wiser friends than
Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough. On the 13th of
February, 1729, Swift summed up the position in his
wholesome and incisive way : —
CONGREVE. 173
This renews the grief for the death of our friend Mr. Congreve,
whom I loved from my youth, and who, surely, beside his other
talents, was a very agreeable companion. He had the misfortune
to squander away a very good constitution in his younger days ; and
I think a man of sense and merit like him is bound in conscience to
preserve his health for the sake of his friends, as well as of himself.
Upon his own account I could not much desire the continuance of his
life, under so much pain and so many infirmities. Years have not
yet hardened me, and I have an addition of weight on my spirits
since we lost him, though I saw him seldom, and possibly, if he
had lived on, should never have seen him more.
Mrs. Whiteway, long afterwards, told Lord Orrery that
letters from Congreve to Swift still existed ; these seem
to have disappeared, and so have the letters, possibly
with gossip about literature and London in them, with
which Congreve is known to have beguiled the exile of
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Of the poetical asso-
ciates of his youth, Southerne alone outlived him, for
Vanbrugh had died in 1726.
CHAPTER V.
IT is not very easy to construct a definite portrait of
Congreve. He was a handsome, plump man, whom
Sir Godfrey Kneller painted for the Kit-Cat Club in a
velvet coat and in that voluminous fair periwig which
delighted Thackeray so much. He looks at us with
his fine dark eyes, and he points with bediamonded
forefinger towards the beauties of a sylvan scene ; but
the picture scarcely gives us an indication of what this
elegant personage may have been at his ease, and among
his intimates. Yet it is certain that it was at the
chimney-corner that he showed off to most advantage,
commonly in the evening, and after a repast washed down
by profuse and genial wines. He was eminently good-
natured, " unreproachful " as Gay called him. No un-
kind word is recorded of Congreve in all the bitter gossip
of two generations. The only moderately unkind thing
he is ever reported to have done is told us by a witness
whom we need not believe. When Lady ^lary ^lontagu
said that Congreve laughed at Pope's verses, she was
herself too angry with Pope to be a candid witness.
Every one liked Congreve, he had sympathy, urbanity,
witty talk, a gentlemanly acquiescence, an ear at every-
LIFE OF CONGREVE. 175
body's service, while Steele might follow Swift, Dennis
succeed Pope, at Congreve's lodgings without a mo-
mentary sense of embarrassment or ill-temper.
But when we have said this we have said almost all we
know. There were no salient points about Congreve's
character. Though an old bachelor, he w^as not eccentric ;
though a man of pleasure, he was discreet. No vagaries,
no escapades, place him in a ludicrous or in a human
light. He passes through the literary life of his time
as if in felt slippers, noiseless, unupbraiding, without
personal adventures. Even the too-picturesque Mrs.
Delariviere Manley can make nothing of his smiling,
faultless rotundity. It is evident, I think, that in this
hitherto unnoticed page of her New Atalantis she is
endeavouring to draw Congreve and Mrs. Bracegirdle : —
Be pleased to direct your eyes towards the pair of beaux in the
next chariot. . . . He on the right is a near favourite of the Muses ;
he has touched the drama with truer art than any of his contempor-
aries, comes nearer nature and the ancients, unless in his last perform-
ance, which indeed met with most applause, however least deserving.
But he seemed to know what he did, descending from himself to
write to the Many, whereas before he wrote to the Few. I find a
wonderful deal of good sense in that gentleman ; he has wit, with-
out the pride and affectation that generally accompanies, and always
corrupts it.
His Myra is as celebrated as Ovid's Corinna, and as well-known.
How happy is he in the favour of that lovely lady ! She, too,
deserves applause, besides her beauty, for her gratitude and sensi-
bility to so deserving an admirer. There are few women, who,
when they once give in to the sweets of an irregular passion, care
to confine themselves to him that first endeared it to them, but not
so the charming Myra.
Anthony Aston, who calls Mrs. Bracegirdle, "the
176 LIFE OF
Diana of the stage," thought that even to Congreve she
was no more than a friend. But he tells us that she was
very fond of the poet, and was always uneasy at his
leaving her, especially as his presence at her side pro-
tected her from the importunities of such fiery lovers as
Lord Lovelace. There is no doubt she was a very
pure-minded and a very amiable woman, so charitable
that the poor of Clare Market were ready to form a
bodyguard to shield her from the impertinence of the
beaux.
Of Congreve's wit in conversation there is no question.
We have seen what Swift thought of it, and Lady Mary,
who had had opportunities of judging, told Spence that
Ishe never knew anybody that had so much wit as
Congreve. He was one of the celebrated coterie of
thirty-nine men of genius and quality, who met in Shire
Lane to eat Christopher Katt's mutton-pies, and who
became the Kit-Cat Club. From its rise in 1700 to its
close about 17 10, Congreve was the life of this brilliant
gathering. But we possess no record of his colloquial
powers ; a joke about Gay's voracity is passably funny,
but not enough to build a reputation on. We shall not
laugh at Congreve's repartees till we can tell what songs
the Sirens sang, and we must take the reputation of his
good fellowship upon faith. Pope and Tonson agreed
that Garth, Vanbrugh, and Congreve were "the three
most honest-hearted real good men of the poetical mem-
bers " of the Club.
One thing which Congreve said, apparently in all
seriousness, has become more famous than any example
of his wit, and may probably be known to thousands of
CONGREVE. 177
persons who never read a line of his writings. This is
his remark to Voltaire when that eminent Frenchman
went to call upon him. It may be well to quote the
whole passage from Voltaire's Letters concerning the
English Nation : —
Mr. Congreve raised the glory of comedy to a greater height than
any English writer before or since his time. He wrote only a few
plays, but they are excellent in their kind. The laws of the drama
are strictly observed in them. They abound with characters, all
which are shadowed with the utmost delicacy, and we don't meet
with so much as one low or coarse jest. The language is every-
where that of men of fashion, but their actions are those of knaves,
a proof that he was perfectly well acquainted with human nature,
and frequented what we call polite company.
He was infirm, and come to the verge of life when I knew him.
Mr. Congreve had one defect, which was his entertaining too mean
an idea of his own first profession, that of a writer, though it was to
this he owed his fame and fortune. He spoke of his works as
trifles that were beneath him, and hinted to me in our first conver-
sation, that I should visit him upon no other foot than that of a
gentleman who led a life of plainness and simplicity. I answered
that had he been so unfortunate as to be a mere gentleman, I should
never have come to see him ; and I was very much disgusted at so
unseasonable a piece of vanity.
The anecdote is interesting and valuable, but perhaps
we need not be so much disgusted at Congreve's attitude
as Voltaire was. We must remember that the incident
occurred in 1726, very late in Congreve's life, when
literary ambition, and, above all, the charming pleasure of
easy composition, had long abandoned him. May not
what Voltaire took to be vanity have been really modesty ?
May not the aged and "unreproachful" poet, separated
from his own writings by so many sterile years, have-
N
178 LIFE OF
come to think his original gifts mediocre, and have
been genuinely a little embarrassed at Voltaire's effusive
flattery ? A young poet with all the world to conquer,
and with the rhymes automatically carolling at the tip of
his tongue, can scarcely conceive the indifference, the
chagrin, of an aged man of letters, stricken with silence,
with never a drop of ichor left in his shrunken vein. I
think that the world has judged Congreve very absurdly
in so easily accepting Voltaire's account of this interview.
The poet can scarcely have been such a snob as Voltaire
indicates; if he had entertained a mean idea of the
literary profession, we should have heard of it from
Swift or Pope. Weary and disappointed, left behind in
/the race of life by nimbler wits, tortured by that dreadful
sterility that had stricken him at thirty, it is probable that
Voltaire's voluble literary comphments seemed to Con-
greve to present an element of possible banter. It was
safer, in that case, to pose as "a gentleman who led a hfe
of plainness and simplicity," than as the Apollo of the
drama. It was prudence in a gouty old person of quality
to avoid being led too far afield by this brilliant and
inquisitive Frenchman. It is an odd example of the
fate that attends man's words, that this solitary example
of reserve has prejudiced Congreve with myriads
of readers who would otherwise have no dislike to his
character.
In one of his letters to Keally, Congreve says, " You
know me enough to know that I feel very sensibly and
silently for those whom I love." This word " silently "
seems to express him very well. He made no protes-
tations, he was never a poseur^ but all through life his
CONGREVE. 179
friends seem to have known that they could depend
upon him. His tastes extended a Httle way ahead of his
age. He had a small collection of pictures.^ In June,
1703, he paid Kneller ^,{^45 for a St. Ceciha, a very large
price for an English painting in those days. Oldys tells
us that he collected chap-books and old ballads, a whim
which even the antiquary seems to think would seem
" diverting to a satirical genius." It may be mentioned
that during part of his life, at all events, Congreve
possessed a little country house at Northall, a village
three miles north-east of Ivinghoe, in Bucks. When he
went there first he must have been still in his athletic
youth, for he speaks of "jumping one-and-twenty fieet at
one jump on Northall Common." This sounds a good
record for a poet " more fat than bard beseems."
The reputation of Congreve has undergone many
-reverses, but will probably never again sink so far as it
* This note, without post -mark, acklressed to Mr. Porter, is
among the British Museum letters (Add. MSS. 4293) : —
Sr.
if you see Mr. Custis to night pray know of him if it be possible
for me to have a picture of Ld. Rochester which was Mrs. Barrys.
I think it is a head. I think it is not as a painting any very great
matter, however I have a very particular reason why I woud have it
at any reasonable rate, at least the refusal of it. if this can de don.
Jie will very much oblige his &
yr.
very humble Servant
W'"^' Congreve.
fryday even :
180 LIFE OF
did half a century ago. In the early Victorian age, his
plays almost ceased to be praised, and perhaps to be
read, while every humanitarian passerby thought it easy
to cast his stone of reproach at these "artificial," " heart-
less," and " immoral " comedies. Of late years the fame
of our greatest comic playwright has been eloquently
defended, and it is doubtful whether any critic of respon-
sibility would, at the present day, be found to endorse
the old strain of condemnation by the moral test. Charles
Lamb, extreme and paradoxical as his famous essay on
" Artificial Comedy " may have been, did infinite good
in distinguishing the temper in which works of amuse-
ment and those of edification should be considered, and
in defending the easy-going dramatists of the seventeenth
century from the charge of being injurious to society.
There is much to be said for Lamb's theory that
the stage of Congreve and Vanbrugh was never in-
tended to represent real life, but merely created in
order to form a " sanctuary and quiet Alsatia," where the
mind could take refuge for a while when hunted by the
casuistries of Puritanism. But the weak points of this
argument are easily divined, and what is really valuable
in Lamb's vindication is the appeal to another tribunal
than the court where the Young Person sits enthroned,
a Rhadamanthus of the minor morals. The result of
Lamb's eloquent special pleading has been to make
English critics feel that when it is said that Congreve is
not " proper," the last word has not been spoken, and
that though his standard of decency is not our own, nor
ever likely to be resumed, his merits as an artist are not
on that account to be overlooked or underrated. In this
CONGREVE. 181
connection, and bearing in mind the fluctuations of sen-
timent upon this question of propriety, we may recollect
that Voltaire, in a passage quoted above, gives special
praise to Congreve for the purity of his language.
Decency of expression is mainly a conventional or com-
parative matter. In the seventeenth century divines
said things to their congregations, and sons wrote anec-
dotes to their mothers, which to-day would sound crude
in the smoking-room of a club, and it was rather Con-
greve's misfortune than his fault that he happened to
flourish as a writer, at the very moment when, in all their
history, Englishmen and Englishwomen were allowing
themselves the broadest license in expression, and the
freest examination of scabrous situations. To dwell any
further on this much-discussed difficulty in this place
seems needless. It is enough to warn the lamb-like
reader, if there be such an one, that in the menagerie
of the Restoration dramatists he must expect to find
lions.
The position of Congreve in the brief and splendid
series of our comic playwrights is easily defined.
Etheredge led the van with his French inspiration, directly
drawn from Moliere, his delicate observation, his light-
ness of touch, his thin elegance. Wycherley followed
with his superior strength, his massive dialogue, his
pungent wit, his vigour, his invention. There could be
no finer introduction to the art of comedy than was sug-
gested by the experiments of these two playwrights.
But they were merely transitional figures, they pointed
the way to a greater master. Looked at as a final expres-'^
sion of a national art, the work of Etheredge would ' '
182 LIFE OF
have seemed flimsy in its lightness, weak in its dehcacy,
while that of \\'ycherley was rough, hard, and unfinished.
The natural complement of these two writers was a
poet who should combine their excellencies, be fine and
yet strong, patient to finish as well as spirited to sketch.
"It was when the public had grown familiar with the types
of writing exemplified at their best in Tlie Man of Mode
and The Plai7i Dealer, that Congreve came forward with
his erudite and brilliant comedies, combining the quahty
of Etheredge with that of Wycherley, adding much from
Molibre, owing much to his own trained and active fancy,
and placing English comedy of manners for the first time
on a really classic basis. By the side of the vivid
characters in Love for Love, the group that dances round
Sir Fopling Flutter seems a cloud of phantoms, and the
Homers and Manleys no better than violent caricatures
of humanity.
With all his genius, with all his opportunity of position,
Congreve did not reach the highest level. The per-
fection of which we have been speaking is relative, and in
comparison with INIoliere, the English comedian takes a
second rank in all but wit. It is remarkable that while
in most branches of literature the English have excelled
in preserving the spirit of great writing while treating the
forms and recognized types very cavalierly, in this one
matter of the Comedy of Manners they failed to take
the highest place precisely through their timid ad-
herence to the rules of composition. If Congreve could
have been forced out into a wider life, persuaded to dis-
regard the restrictions of artificial comedy, obliged to
draw men where and as he observed them, if, in other
CO NCR EVE. 183
words, he could have written in a more English fashion,
there is no apparent reason why he might not now stand
close by the shoulder of Moliere. The Englishmen who
immediately followed him, Vanbrugh and Farquhar, with
much less art than he, and genius decidedly inferior, have
put themselves sometimes almost on a level with Con-
greve through their very audacity, their disregard of rules.
Not one of their comedies, if carefully analyzed, reveals
the science, the balance of parts, the delicate literary
skill of Congreve, but their scenes are apt to be so much
breezier than his, their characters have so much more
blood and bustle, that we over-estimate their relative
value in comparison with Congreve. Yet, with all his
limitations, he remains the principal figure in English
comedy of manners, one of the secondary glories of our
language and literature, and in his own narrow kind un-
surpassed even by such broader and more genial masters
as Terence and Moliere.
On one side the excellence of Congreve seems unique
among the comic dramatists of the world. He is pro-
bably, of them all, the one whose plays are written with
the most unflagging wit and literary charm. The style
of Congreve lifts him high above all his English rivals^
and there is no test so unfair to Wycherley or to Farquhar
as that of comparing a fragment of their work with an
analogous fragment of his. Hazlitt has excellently said
that Congreve's comedies "are a singular treat to those
who have cultivated a taste for the niceties of English
style : there is a peculiar flavour in the very words, which
is to be found in hardly any other writer." What we call
his wit, that which makes his scenes so uniformly
184 LIFE OF
dazzling, consists, in a great measure, in this inexplicable
felicity of phrase, this invariable selection of tlie unex-
pected and yet obviously the best word. In this art of
diction he resembles none of his own sturdy contem-
poraries; the sentences are as hmpid as Addison's, as
melodious as Berkeley's, as highly coloured as Sterne's,
and this quality of his style makes Congreve very in-
teresting to the student. He stands on the threshold of
the eighteenth century, and seems to have an intuition of
all its peculiar graces.
Yet every admirer of Congreve has experienced the
fatigue that this very brilliance, this unflagging glitter
of style produces. It is altogether beyond not credi-
bility only, but patience. The prodigality of wit be-
comes wearisome, and at last only emphasizes the
absence of tenderness, simplicity, and genuine imagi-
nation. It is at such a moment that Thackeray
steps in, and throwing the shutters suddenly open,
floods the stage of Congreve with the real light of
life, and in a few marvellous pages disenchants us of
his " tawdry play-house taper." But we must not permit
the intrusion. There is a sunshine that filters through
the dewy hawthorn-branches, there is a wax-light that
flashes back from the sconces of an alcove, but these are
not compatible, and the latter is not justly to be ex-
tinguished by the former. In the comedies of Congreve
we breathe an atmosphere of the most exquisite artificial
refinement, an air of literary frangipan or millefleur-water.
What we have to admire in them is the polish, the grace,
the extreme technical finish, the spectacle of an intellect
of rare cultivation and power concentrating itself on the
CONGREVE. 185
creation of a microcosm swarming with human volvox
and vibrion. If w^e are prepared to accept this, and to
ask no more than this from Congreve, we shall not grudge
him his permanent station among the great writers of this
•country.
The End.
APPENDIX.
THE notes supplied by Southerne exist, in the hand-
writing of that poet, in the British Museum. As
they have never been printed in their original form, I
have thought it interesting to transcribe them verbatim.
The press-mark is Add. MSS. 4221 : —
Mr. Will. Congreve was the Son of a younger brother of a good
old family in Staffordshire, who was employd in the stewardship of
part of the great estate of ye Earl of Burlington in Ireland, where
he resided many years, his only son the Poet was born in that
Country, went to the free school at Kilkenny, and from thence ta
Trinity College in Dublin, where he had the advantage of being
educated under a polite schollar, and ingenious Gentleman Dr. St.
George Ash, who was after Provost of that College, then Bp. of
Cloghar, and then Bp. of Derry. this Bp. had the great good fortune
of haveing the two famusest Witts his pupills the most extraordinary
Dr. Swift, Dean of St. Patricks, and Mr. Will. Congreve, tho not
at the same time. Mr. Congreve was of the Middle Temple, his
first performance was an ingcnioiw Novel, calld incognita, then he
began his Play the old Batchelor haveing little Acquaintance withe
the traders in that way, his Cozens recommended him to a friend of
theirs,^ who was very usefuU to him in the whole course of his
Probably Southerne himself.
188 APPENDIX.
play, he engag'd Mr. Dryden in its favour, who upon reading it sayd
he never saw such a first play in his life, but the Author not being
acquainted with the stage or the town, it would be pity to have it
miscarry for want of a little Assistance : the stuff was rich indeed,
it wanted only the fashionable cutt of the town. To help that Mr.
Dryden, Mr. Manwayring, and Mr. Southern red it with great care,
and Mr. Dryden putt it in the order it was playd, Mr. Southerne
obtaind of Mr. Thos : Davenant who then governd the Playhouse,
that Mr. Congreve shoud have the privilege of the Playhouse half
a year before his play was playd, wh. I never knew allowd any one
before : it was playd with great success that play made him many
friends, Mr. Montacue, after Ld. Ilallyfax was his Patron, putt him
into the Commission for hackney coaches, and then into the Pipe
Office, and then gave him a Patent place in the Customs of 600
Pds. per ann. and Secretary to Jamaica, yt payd him 700 Pounds a
year by deputy on ye Exchange at Lond.
This document is endorsed, probably in the hand of
John Campbell, " Memoirs relating to Mr. Congreve
written by Mr. Thomas Southern, and communicated to
me from him by the hands of Dr. Thomas Pellett,
January 12th, 173I." Southerne died so late as May 26,
1746, at the age of eighty-seven.
INDEX.
Absolute Unlawfiilness of the
Stage, TIu, 112
Addison, Joseph, 61, 62
Amendments of Mr. Collier's Ci-
tations, 120-123
Amphitryon, 41
Animadversions on Mr. Con-
greve, 123-125
Arbuthnot, John, 168, 169
Ashe, St. George, 15, 187
Aston, Anthony, 175
Ayliffe, Mrs., 44
B.
Baker, Sir Richard, 97
Barry, Mrs., 37, 38, 66, 69, 87,
137
Behn, Aphra, 18, 66
Beljame, A., 98
Berkeley, George Monck, 11, 142
Bertie, Peregrine, 131
Betterton, Thomas, 35, 50, 62, 6-^,
66, 67, 87, 119, 137, 152, 157,
161
Birth of tJie Muse, T/ie, 94
Blackmore, Sir Richard, 100
Blandford, Marquis of, 154
Bowman, Mrs., 37, 69, 143, 151
Bracegirdle, Mrs. Anne, 10, 35,
36, 37. 55. ^^, 87, 119, 134, 136,
143. 148, 149. 151, i6x, 168,
^73' 175
Burnet, Gilbert, 98
C.
Campbell, Dr. John, 10, 188
Canterbury Gnests, The, 81
Gibber, CoUey, ir, 32, 60, 62, 66,
^7, 157
Gibber, Theophilus, 13
Cleomenes, 108
Clifford, Lord, 38
Cobham and Congreve, 169
Cobham, Lord, see Temple
Collier, Jeremy, The Short View,
101-130
Congreve, Richard, 14
Congreve, William, the Elder, 14
22, 38
Confederacy, The, 154
Co7isecration of John Abassns, 79
Cowley, Abraham, 84, 158, 159
Crebillon, the Elder, 88
Creech, Thomas, 26, 27
Crowne, John, 21, 24, 30, 52
Curll, 9, 170
190
INDEX.
D.
Davenant, Thomas, 33, 188
Davenant, William, junr., 153
Davies, Thomas, -^j
Defence of Dramatic Poct)'y, A,
114. 115
Defence of the Short View, A, 126,
127
Dennis, John, 44, 78, 79, 80, 83,
95, 115, 116, 120, 125, 133, 166,
167
Discourse on Pi7idaric Ode, A,
158-160
Doggett, Thomas, 35, 37, 50, 69
Don Sebastian, 106
Dorset, Earl of, 27, 33, 63, yj
Double Dealer, The, 48-58
Dryden, John, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29,
30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39, 40, 46.
47, 48, 56-58, 79, 85, 102, 106,
107, 108, 109, 128, 131, 132,
139, 144, 165, 188
Dryden, John, the younger, 85
D'Urfey.Tom, no, 113, 119, 125,
144
E.
Eccles, John, 143
£pso}n Wells, 84
Estcourt, Richard, 163
Etheredge, Sir George, 24, 31, 41,
181
Evelyn, John, 94
Evening's Love, An ; or, The
Mock Astrologer, 106, 107
F.
Pair Quaker of Kent, The, 77
P'aithful SJicpherdcss, The, 102
Falkland, Anthony, Lord, 39
Farquhar, George, 132
Filnian, Edward, 114, 115, 118,
119
Finger, the Musician, 143
Further Dejence, A, 118, 119
G.
Garth, Sir Richard, 149, 151
Gay, John, 167, 168, 169,170, 171,
176
Gethin, Grace, Lady, 146, 147
Gildon, Charles, 61, 112, 113, 120,
125
Godolphin, Lord, 160, 171
Gould, Robert, 86
Grisy, A. de, 64
H.
Harris, Walter, 13
Harrison, William, 163
Hazlitt, William, 70
Higgons, Bevil, 39
Hinton, Dr., 15
Holiday, Barton, 27
Hopkins, Charles, 39, 78, 125
Hunt, Arabella, 155, 156
Hunt, Leigh, 10, 105, 172
Husband his own Cuckold, 2 he,
85
L
Inipostzire Defeated, The, 124,
Incognita, 16-21
Jacob, Giles, 11, 166
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 10, 45, 87,
89
Jonson, Ben, 81, 82, 104, 144
Jourtial to Stella, The, 161, 162,
163
Judgment of Paris, Tlie, 142-144
INDEX.
101
Jttstice of Peace, The, 95
Juvenal and Persius, 2.6-2(^
K.
Kalt, Christopher, 176
Keally, Joseph, 141, 142, 146,
150, 151, 152, 160, 161, 178
Keats, John, 156
Ki7}g Arthur, 100
Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 174, 178
Kynaston, the actor, 51, 59
L.
Lamb, Charles, 180
Landsdowne, Lord, 86
Law, WiUiam, 102, 112
Lee, Nat, 91, 92, 108
Leigh, the actor, 34, 35
Leigh, Mrs., 37, 151
Letter to Mr. Coiigreve, ^,123
Leveson, Katharine, 17
Love for Love, 66-78, 106, 154
Love Triumphant, 109
Luttrel, Narcissus, 64, 82, 94, 119
M.
Macaulay, Lord, 10, 35, loi, 103
Maid's Last Prayer, The, 43
Malone, Edmund, 11
Man of Mode, The, 138
Manley, Mrs. Delariviere, 86, 175
Marlborough, Henrietta, Duchess
of, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172
Marsh, J. D., 39
Mary IL, Queen, 58, 59, 60, 63-
Maynvvaring, Arthur, 32, 33, 34,
188
Merriton, G., loi
Milton's blank verse, 92, 93
Mohun, Lord, 34
Mohun, IMrs., 61
Moliere, 42, 52, 54, 55, 109, 137
Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, 148
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley,
174, 176
Montague, Charles, Lord Halifax,
47. 48, 49. 56, 62, 79, 142, 145,
164, 165, 188
Motteux, Peter Anthony, 113,
128
Mountfort, WiUiam, 34, 35
Mountfort, Mrs., 36, 37, 6-]
Mourning Bride, The, So, 84,
86-94, 126
Moyle, Walter, 32, 33, 40, 79, 80,
83
N.
New Atalantis, The, 175
Nokes, the actor, 34, 35
Ode on Mrs. Arabella Hunt^ 155,
156
Ode to the King, 84
Old Bachelor, The, 22, 32-43, 46
Oldham, John, 27, 30
Oldmixon, John, 10
Oro7iooko, Southerne's, 85
Otway, Thomas, 32, 88
Ozell, John, 150
Payne, Dr., 97
Phaeton, 112
Pindar, 158, 159
Pix, Mary, S6, 124, 125
Pope, Alexander, 41, 78, 161, 166,
167, 168, 169, 171, 176
Porter, Edward, 140, 141, 179
Powell, George, 35, 124
Prior, Matthew, 162
Prynne, 97
192
INDEX.
Purcell, Daniel, 143, 144
Purcell, Henry, 44
R.
Racine, 88
Ravenscroft, Edward, 81, 99
Reconciliation , Rovve's, 163
ReliqtiicB GethiniancB, 146, 147
Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of,
96, 98
Rowe, Nicholas, 93, 162, 163
S.
Sandford, the actor, 68
School of Politics, The, 25, 26
Settle, Elkanah, 21, 30
Shadwell, Thomas, 30, 41, 52, 57,
81. 84, 97
Shakespeare, 104
Short Vindication, A, 116- 118
Sir Antlwny Love, 31, 41
Sir Courtly Nice, 41
Smollett, Tobias, 76, ^^
Southerne, Thomas, 13, 16, 31,
32. 34. 38. 39. 40. 43. 47. 85,
88, 187, 188
Spence's Anecdotes, 11
Squire Trelooby, 148-151
Sta^e Acquitted, The, 129
Stage Condemn'' d. The, 125-127
Steele, Sir Richard, 41, 42, 44, 61,
62, 134, 161
Stepney, George, 27
Swift, Jonathan, 15, 16, 19, 48,
59, 152, 161, 162, 163, 164,
165, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172,
173, 187
T.
Tate, Nahum, 16, 27
Tatler, The, 41, i6i
Tears of Amaryllis, The, 154, 155
Temple, Sir Richard (Lord Cob-
ham), 162, 169, 170, 171
Thackeray, W. M., 11, 47. I34.
184
Theatrum Triuviphans, cri
Tickell, Thomas, 62
Tonson, Jacob, 47, 119, 140. iS3.
162, 163, 176
Trotter, Catharine (Mrs. Cock-
burne), 86, 119, 14S
U.
Underhill, the actor, 68
Usefulness of tlie Stage, The, 115,.
116
V.
Vanbrugh, Sir John, 103, 104,
116, 117, 118, 120, 125, 149,
150, 153, 158, 162
Verbruggen, Mrs., 85
Victor, Benjamin, 44
Vindication of the Stage, A, 113,
114
Voltaire, 99, 177, 178, 181
W.
Walsh, WiUiam, 49, 149, 150*
161
Ware, Sir James, 13
Way of the World, The, 40, 52,
132-139
Wellington, R., 17
" Wilson, Charles," 10
Wives' Excuse, The, 31
Woodward, Dr., 94
Wycherley, William, 31, 35. 40»'
41, 42, 52, S3, 79, 80, 102, .110,
113, 114, 116, 181
Y.
Young, Edward, 93. '.172
BIBLIOGRAPHY*
BY
JOHN R ANDERSON
(British Ahtseum).
I. Works.
II. Dramatic Works.
III. TOEMS.
IV. Single Works.
V. IkllSCELLANEOUS.
VI. Appendix —
Biogi-apliy, Criticism, etc.
Magazine Articles.
VII. Chronological List of
Works.
I. WORKS.
The First (— Third) Volume of
the Works of Mr. William
Congreve. 3 vols. London,
1710, 8vo.
The pagination is continuous
throughout, and the several pieces
have distinct title-pages. There is
another issue of this edition, with a
collective title-page bearing date
1717.
The AVorks of Mr. William
Congreve. Third edition, re-
vi^-ed by the author. London,
1719-20, 12mo.
Tne several pieces have separate
title-pages.
. Fifth edition. 3 vols. Lon-
don, 1730, 12mo.
— Another edition. 3 vols.
London, 1753, 12mo.
— Another edition. 3 vols.
Birmingham, 1761, 8vo.
— Another edition. 3 vols.
Dublin, 1773, 16mo.
— Seventh edition. To which
is prefixed the life of the author.
2 vols. London, 1774, 12mo.
II. DRAMATIC WORKS.
The Dramatic Works of William
Congreve. Containing The Old
Bachelor ; The Way of the
World ; Love for Love ; The
Mourning Bride ; The Double
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Dealer. 5 pts. Dublin, 1731,
12mo.
Each play has a separate title-
page and pagination ; Nos. 2 and 3
were published in 1730 and 1729
respectively.
The Dramatic Works of William
Congreve. (Concerning humour
in comedy. A letter — Amend-
ments of Mr. Collier's citations
from the Old Baclielor, etc.) 2
vols, London, 1773, 12mo.
The Dramatic Works of Wycher-
ley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and
Farquhar. With biographical
and critical notices by Leigh
Hunt. London, 1-849, 8vo.
The Best Plays of the Old
Dramatists. William Congreve.
Edited by Alexander Charles
Ewald. London, 1887, 8vo.
in. POEMS.
Tlie Poetical Works of Will. Con-
greve. {BdVs Edition. The
Poets of Great Britain, vol.
Ixvi.) Edinburg, 1778, 12mo.
The Poems of Congreve and Fen-
ton. ( JVorlcs of tJie English
Poets, hy Samuel Johnson, vol.
xxix.) London, 1779, 8vo.
Another edition. ( Works of the
English Pacts, hy Samuel John-
son, vol. xxxiv.) London, 1790,
8vo.
The Poetical Works of William
Congreve. {Anderson's Poets of
Great Britain, vol. vii.) Edin-
burgh, 1793, 8vo.
Select Poems of William Congreve.
(Park's Works of the British
Poets, Sup2Jlement, etc.) London,
1809, 16mo.
The Poems of William Congreve.
(Chalmers' Works of the English
Poets, vol. X.) London, 1810,
8vo.
Select Poems of William Con-
greve, with a life of the Author.
{Sand/ord's Works of tlie British
Poets, vol. xiv.) Philadelphia,
1819, 12mo.
IV. SINGLE WORKS.
Amendments upon Mr. Collier's
false and imperfect citations [in
his "Short View of the Pro-
faneness, etc., of the English
Stage"] from the Old Batche-
lour. Double Dealer, Love for
Love, Mourning Bride. By the
author of those plays. London,
1698, 8vo.
The Birth of the Muse : a poem.
London, 1698, fol.
The Double Dealer : a comedy.
[In five acts and in prose.]
London, 1694, 4to.
Another edition. London
[1694 ?], 8vo.
Another edition. [London],
1711, 8vo.
Another edition. {Collection
of English Plays, vol. vii.)
London [1711], 8vo.
Another edition. London,
1735, 12mo.
Another edition. London,
1739, 12mo.
Another edition. {Bell's
British Theatre, vol. xiii.)
London, 1777, 12mo.
Another edition. {Neiojilyig-
lish Theatre, vol. ix.) London,
1777, 8vo.
Another edition . (BeU's Bri-
tish Thcatre,\o\. xxviii. ) London,
1797, 8vo.
Another edition, revised by
J. P. Kemble. London [1802],
8vo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
iii
The Double Dealer. Another edi-
tion. [Modern British Brama,
vol. iii.) London, 1811, 8vo.
Another edition. Revised by
J. P. Kemble, etc. London,
1815, 8vo.
Another edition. {DibdirCs
London Theatre, vol. xx.)
London, 1816, 16mo.
Another edition. {London
Stage, vol. iv.) London [1824],
Svo.
Another edition. {Acting
Brama.) London, 1834, 8vo.
Incognita : or, Love and Duty
reconcil'd. By Cleophil. Lon-
don, 1692, Svo.
Another edition. London,
1700, Svo.
Another edition. London,
1713, Svo.
Another edition. London,
1713, 12mo.
The Judgment of Paris : a Masque.
London, 1701, 4to.
Another edition. [London,
1778 ?], Svo.
A letter [in verse] to Viscount
Cobhani [on various subjects].
London, 1729, fol.
. Love for Love. A comedy. [In
* five acts and in prose.] Lon-
don, 1695, 4to.
Second edition. London,
1695, 4to.
Another edition. London
[1696 ?], Svo.
Another edition. {Collection
of English Plays, vol. vii.] Lon-
don, 1720, Svo.
Another edition. London,
1720, Svo.
Another edition. London,
1733, 12mo.
Anotlier edition. London,
1747, 12mo.
Another edition. {Bell's
British Theatre, vol. viii.) Lon-
don, 1776, 12mo.
Another edition. {A^ew
English Theatre, vol. v.) Lon-
don, 1776, Svo.
Another edition. {BclVs
British Theatre, vol. i.) Lon-
don, 1797, Svo.
Another edition. {InchhaWs
British Theatre, vol. xiii. ) Lon-
don, 1808, 12mo.
Another edition. {Modern
British Brama, vol. iii..
Comedies.) London, 1811, 8vo.
Another edition. {Bibdin's
London Theatre, vol. xvi.)
London, 1815, 16mo.
Another edition. {London
Stage, vol. iii.) London [1824],
Svo.
Another edition. {British
Brama, \ol. a.) London, 1826,
Svo.
Another edition. {Cumber-
land' s British Theatre, vol. xix.)
London [1829 ?], 12mo.
Another edition. {Acting
Brama.) London, 1834, Svo.
Another edition. {British
Brama, vol. x.) London,
1872, Svo.
Congreve's Comedy of
Love for Love revised, curtailed,
and altered by J. W. AVallack.
Marked, as acted, by H. B,
Phillips. New York, 1854,
12mo.
Buxom Joan of Lymas
\i. e. , Limeliouse]'s Love to a Jolly
Sailor ; or the JMaiden's Choice ;
being Love for Love again, etc.
[The first three verses taken
from "W. Congreve's Love for
Love. With the musical notes.
London [1695 ?], s. sh. fol.
The Mourning Bride. A tragedy.
IV
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
[In five arts, and in verse.]
London, 1697, 4to.
Second edition, London,
1679 [1697], 4to.
Second edition. London,
1697, 12mo.
Another edition. London
[1697 ?], 8vo.
Another edition. {Collection
of Engllsli Plays,\o\. viii.) Lon-
don [1711], 8vo.
Another edition. London,
1776, Svo.
Another edition. {New Eng-
lish Theatre^ vol, iv.) London,
1776, Svo.
Another edition. {BdVs
British Theatre, vol. iii.) Lon-
don, 1776, 12mo.
Another edition. London,
1777, Svo.
Another edition. {Bell's
British Theatre, vol. xix.) Lou-
don, 1797, Svo.
Another edition. {Inchhald's
British Theatre, vol. xiii. ) Lon-
don, 1S08, 12mo.
Another edition. {Modern
British ^ravuiy vol. i.) Lon-
don, 1811, Svo.
Another edition. {Dihdin's
London Theatre, vol. xi.) Lon-
don, 1815, 16mo.
Another edition. Edinburgh
[1820 ?], 12mo.
Another edition. {British
Drama, vol. i. ) London, 1824,
Svo.
Another edition. {London
Stage, vol. iv.) London [1824],
Svo.
Another edition. (British
Drama, vol. iii.) London, 1865,
Svo.
The Mourning Muse of Alexis. A
pastoral lamenting the death of
Queen Mary, etc. London, 1695,
fol.
Second edition. London,
1695, fol.
Third edition. Dublin, 1695,
fol.
Another edition. {Collection
of English Poetry, vol. ii.) Lon-
don, 1709, Svo.
The Old Bachelor. A Comedy
[in five acts and in prose]. Lon-
don, 1693, 4to.
Second edition.
1693, 4to.
Another edition.
[1693], Svo.
Sixth edition,
London, 1697, 4to.
Another edition.
1710, Svo.
Another edition.
of English Plays, vol.
don, 1720, Svo.
Another edition.
British Theatre, vol.
don, 1776, 12nio.
Another edition. {New
English Theatre, vol. iii.) Lon-
don, 1776, Svo.
Another edition.
1781, Svo.
Another edition.
British Theatre, vol.
London, 1797, Svo.
Another edition.
British Drama, vol. iii.)
don, 1811, Svo.
A Piudarique Ode, humbly ofTer'd
to the King on his taking
Namure. London, 1695, fol.
A Pindarique Ode, humbly offer'd
to the Queen on the victorious
progress of Her ]\Iajesty's arms,
under the conduct of the Duke
of j\Iarlborough. To which is
prefixed a discourse on the
London,
London,
corrected.
London,
{Collection
vii.) Lon-
{BelVs
ii.) Lon-
London,
{BelVs
xxviii.)
{Modern
Lon-
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Pindarique Ode. London,
1706, iol.
The Story of Semele. [An opera,
in three parts and in verse.]
Altered Irom the Semele of
"William Congreve, set to musick
bv Mr. G. F. Handel. London,
1744, 4to.
The words only. Semele first
appeared in the " Works," 1710.
Semele [an oratorio in three
parts]. Alter'd from the
Semele of Congreve. London,
1762, 4to.
The Tears of Amaryllis for Amyn-
tas; a pastoral on the death
of the Marquis of Blandford,
etc. London, 1705, fol.
^ The Way of the World. A Comedy.
[In five acts, and in prose.] Lon-
don, 1700, 4to.
• Another edition. London
[17U0?], 12mo.
Second edition. London,
1706, 4to.
Another edition. {^Collection
of EngUsh Plays, Yo\. vii.) Lon-
don [1720], 8vo.
Another edition. London,
1735, 12mo.
Another edition. {New Eng-
lish Theatre, vol. v.) London,
1776, 8vo.
Another edition. {Bell's
British Theatre, vol. xi.) Lon-
don, 1777, 12mo.
Another edition. {Bell's British
Theatre, vol. xxxiii.) Lon-
don, 1797, Svo.
Another edition. Eevised by
J. P. Kemble, etc. London
[1800], 8vo.
Another edition. {Modern
British Drama, vol. iii.) Lon-
1811, 8vo.
Another edition. Revised by
etc. London,
J. P. Kemble,
1815, Svo.
Another edition. {Lihdin^s
London Theatre, vol. xxiv.)
London, 1818, 16mo.
Another edition. {London
Stage, vol. iv.) London [1824],
Svo.
Another edition. {British
Drama, vol. xi.) Ijondoiij
1872, Svo.
y. MISCELLANEOUS.
The Dramatic "Works of John
Dryden. [Edited by W. Con-
greve.] 6 vols. London, 1717,
12mo.
Another edition. 6 vols. Lon-
don, 1735, 12mo.
Another edition. 6 vols,
London, 1762, 12mo.
Epistle [in verse] on Retirement
and Taste. {Miscellany on Taste,
by Fojje.) London, 1732, Svo.
An essay concerning humour in
Comedy.
See "Letters upon several occa-
sions."
Hymn to Venus, translated by
"William Congreve. {Minor
Poems of Homer. ) New York,
1872, Svo.
Letters upon several occasions ;
written by and between Mr.
Dryden, Mr. Wycherly, Mr.
Congreve, and Mr. Dennis, etc,
[Contains " An Essay concern-
ing Humour."] London, 1696,
Svo.
Another edition. {Select
Works of John Dennis, vol. ii)
London, 1718, Svo.
Mr. Congreve's Last "Will and
Testament ; with characters of
his writings by Mr. Dryden,
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Sir R. Blaclvmore, IMr. Addison,
and ]\Iajor Pack. To which are
added two pieces — viz., I. Of
rightly improvin.i;; the present
time, an epistle [in verse] from
Mr. Con^reve. II. The Game
of Quadrille, an allegory. Lon-
don, 1729, 8vo.
Miscelleneous Works written by
His Grace, late Duke of Buck-
ingham ; also State Poems on
the late times by Dryden,
Etheridge, Sheppard, Butler,
Earl of r)(orset), Congreve, etc.
London, 1704, 8vo.
Ovid's Art of Love, in three books.
Together with his Remedy of
Love. Translated into English
verse by several eminent hands
[J. Dryden, W. Congreve, and
N. Tate]. London, 1709, 8vo.
Numerous editions.
Ovid's Metamorphoses, in fifteen
books. Translated [into English
verse] by the most eminent
hands [J. Dryden, J. Addison,
L. Eusden, W. Congreve, etc.].
London, 1717, fol.
Fifth edition. 2 vols, Lon-
don, 1751, 12mo.
' Another edition. 2 vols.
New York, 1815, 12mo.
Tales and Novels in verse. From
the French of La Fontaine, by
several hands [Topham, W.
Congreve, and others]. Pub-
lished by S, Humphreys. Edin-
burgh, 1762, 12mo.
Verses sacred to the Memory of
Grace, Lady Gethiu, etc. {Laclxj
Gdhin's Misery is Vertices
Whetstone.) London, 1703, 4to.
Works of Juvenal and Persius,
translated by John Dryden
(William Congreve) and others.
London, 1693, fol.
Another edition. {Anderson's
Poets of Great Britain, vol. xii.)
London, 1793, etc., 8vo.
— Another edition. {British
Poets, vol. xcvii.) Chiswick,
1822, 12mo.
VI. APPENDIX.
Biography, Criticism, etc.
Baker, David Erskine. — Bio-
graphia Dramatica ; or, a com-
panion to the Playhouse, etc.
3 vols. London, 1S12, 8vo.
Congreve, vol. i., pp. 141-144.
Berkeley, George Monck. — Liter-
ary relics : containing original
letters from King Charles II.,
Steele, Congreve, etc. London,
1789, 8vo.
Biographia Britannica. — Bio-
graphia Britannica : or, the
lives of the most eminent per-
sons, etc. 6 vols. London,
1747-66, fol.
AV'illiam Congreve, vol. ill., pp.
1439-1449.
Cibber, Theophilus. — The Lives
of the Poets of Great Britain
and Ireland. By T. Cibl)er
[R. Shiels and others], 5 vols.
London, 1753, 12nio.
William Congreve, vol. iv., pp.
83-98.
Coleridge, Hartley. — Biographia
Borealis ; or, lives of dis-
tinguished Northerns. Lon-
don, 1833, 8vo.
William Congreve, pp. 665-693.
Congreve, William. — Animadver-
sions on Mr. Congreve's late
answer to Mr, Collier, in a
dialogue. And some offers
towards new-modeling the
stage. London, 1698, 8vo.
Second edition. London,
1698, 8vo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
vii
Congreve, William. — A Letter to
Mr. Congreve on his pretended
amendments, etc., of Mr. Col-
lier's Short View of the Immor-
ality and Prophaneness of the
English Stage. London, 1698,
8vo.
The Temple of Fame ; a
poem, inscribed to Mr. Con-
greve. London, 1709, 12mo.
• A Poem to the Memory of
Mr. Congreve. [By James
Thomson.] London, 1729, Svo.
Another edition. [Edited by
Rev. H. J. Gary for the Percy
Society.] London, 1843, Svo.
Crawfurd, Oswald. — English
Comic dramatists. Edited by 0.
Crawfurd. London, 1883, Svo.
Congreve, pp. 129-160,
Davies, Thomas. — Dramatic Mis-
cellanies, etc. 3 vols. Lon-
don, 1784, 8vo.
Congreve, vol. iii., pp. 311-382.
Doran, J. — Annals of the English
Stage, from Thomas Betteiton
to Edmund Kean. Edited by
Robert W. Lowe. 3 vols.
London, 1888, Svo.
Numerous references to Con-
greve.
Dryden, John. — The Critical and
Miscellaneous Prose Works of
John Dryden. With an account
of the Life and Writings of the
author, by Edmond Malone. 3
vols. London, 1800, Svo.
Numerous references to Congreve.
Genest, J. — Some account of the
English Stage, from the Restora-
tion in 1660 to 1830. [By J.
Genest.] 10 vols. Bath, 1832, Svo.
References to Congreve, vol. ii.
Gosse, Edmund W. — English
Odes, selected by E. W. Gosse,
{Parchment Library. ) Lon don ,
1881, Svo.
Congi-eve is noticed in the Intro-
duction, and an ode "On Mrs.
Arabella Hunt's Singing" is in-
cluded in the collection.
Grisy, A. de. — Histoire de la
Comedie Anglaise (1672-1707).
Paris, 1878, Svo.
Congreve, pp. 151-257.
Hayman, Rev. Samuel.— The New
Handbook for Youghal, etc.
Youghal, 1858, Svo.
References to Congi-eve, pp. 53
and 55.
Hazlitt, William.— A Yiew of the
English Stage, etc. London,
1818, Svo.
"Love for Love," pp. 226-229.
Lectures on the English
Comic Writers, etc. London,
1819, Svo.
Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh,
and Farquhar, pp. 133-176.
Hunt, Leigh. — The Dramatic
Works of Wycherley, Congreve*
Yanbrugh, and Farquhar. Lon-
don, 1849, Svo.
Biographical and critical notice
of Congreve, pp. xix.-xxxviii.
Jacob, Giles. — The Poetical Regis-
ter; or, the lives and characters
of the English dramatic poets,
etc. 2 vols. London, 1719,
1720, Svo.
William Congreve, vol. 1., pp. 41-
46 ; vol. ii., pp. 248-250.
Johnson, Samuel — The lives of
the most eminent English Poets,
etc. 4 vols. London, 1781,
Svo.
Congreve, vol, iii., pp. 43-69.
L'Estrange, Rev. A. G. — History
of English Humour, etc. 2
vols. London, 1878, 8vo.
Congreve, vol. i., pp. 355-358.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. —
Critical and Historical Essays,
contributed to the Edinburgh
Heview. 3 vols. London,
1843, Svo.
Comic Dramatists of the Restorar
tion, vol. iii., pp. 255-312.
Moyle, Walter. — The whole works
Vlll
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
of Walter Moyle, etc. London,
1727, 8vo.
Letters from Congreve, pp. 227
and 231.
Nichols, John. — Literary Anec-
dotes of the eighteenth century,
etc. 9 vols. London, 1812-
1815, 8vo.
Numerous references to Congreve.
Notes and Queries. General
Index to Notes and Queries.
Five series. London, 1856-
1880, 4to.
References to William Congreve.
The Justice of Peace ; or, A
Vindication of Peace from
several late pamphlets, written
by Mr. Congreve, Dennis, etc.
In doggrel verse. By a Poet.
London, 1697, 4to.
Stephen, Leslie. — Congreve.
{Dictionary of National Bio-
graphy, vol. xii., pp. 6-9.) Lon-
don, i887, 8vo.
Swinburne, Algernon C. — Con-
greve. (Vol. vi,, pp. 271, 272
of the EncydopcBdia Britannica. )
London, 1877, 4to.
Miscellanies. London, 1886,
8vo.
Congreve, pp. 50-55,
Temple, Ricliard, Viscount Coh-
liain. — Cobham and Congreve.
An epistle to Lord Viscount
Cobham in memory of his friend
Mr. Congreve. London, 1730,
8vo.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. —
The English Humorists of the
Eighteenth Century, etc. Lon-
don, 1853, 8vo.
Congreve and Addison, pp. 55-104.
"Ward, Adolphus William, — A His-
tory of English Dramatic Litera-
ture to the death of Queen Anne.
2 vols. London, 1875, Svo.
■\Villiam Congreve, vol. ii., pp, 582-
589.
Ward, Thomas Humphry. — The
English Poets. Selections with
critical introductions by various
writers, etc. 4 vols. London,
1880, Svo.
William Congreve. Essay (by
Austin Dobson) and Selected
Poems, vol. iii., pp. 10-12.
Ware, Sir James, — The whole
Works of Sir James Ware. 2
vols. London, 1739-64. Fol.
Congreve, vol. ii., p. t^94.
Watkins, John. — Cliaiacteristic
Anecdotes of Men of Learning
and Genius, etc. London, 1808,
Svo,
William Congreve, pp. 420-425.
Wharton, Grace and Philip. — The
Wits and Beaux of Society.
Second edition. London [1861],
Svo.
William Congreve, pp. 121-143,
Wilson, Charles. — Memoirs of the
life, writings, and amours of
W. Congreve, Esq., interspersed
with miscellaneous essaj'^s,
letters, etc., written by him.
Also some very curious memoirs
of Mr. Dryden and his family,
with a character of him by ilr.
Congreve. London, 1730, Svo.
Zinck, August G. L. — Congreve,
Vanbrugh, og Sheridan. En
Skildring til Belysniiig af de
sociale Forhold og det aandelige
Liv i England fra Carl den
Andens Tid og til henimod den
franske Rev(jlution. Kjijben-
havn, 1869, Svo.
Magazine Articles.
Congreve, William. — Edinburgh
Keview, by T. B. Macaulay,
vol. 72, 1810, pp. 514-528.
and Wychcrlry. — Gentleman's
Ma-azine, by Charles C. Clarke,
voh 7, N.S,, 1871, pp, 823-845,
as a Writer of L'vmcdy. Scots
Magazine, vol. m, 1804, pp. 9-14,
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
IX
VII. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS.
Incognita ; or, Love and
Duty reconcil'd
Old Bachelor
Double Dealer .
Mourning Muse of Alexis .
Love for Love .
Pindarique Ode to the King
on his taking Namur
Letter on Comedy
Mourning Bride
The Birth of the Muse : a
poem ....
Amendments upon Mr. Col-
lier's False and Imperfect
Citations
1692
1693
1694
1695
1695
1695
1696
1697
1698
1698
Way of the World . .1700
The Judgment of Paris : a
masque .... 1701
The Tears of Amaryllis for
Amyntas . . . 1705
Pindarique Ode to the
Queen .... 1706
Works {^First Collected
Edition) . . .1710
Dramatic Works of John
Bvyd^Qn {Edited) . . 1717
Letter [in verse] to Vis-
count Cobham . . 1729
Printed b]/ Walter Hcoit, Fell iji;y, ^ewcastle-on-Tyne.
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