for a piece of address in others, in consequence of his own hearty appreciation of whatsoever is graceful towards the sex, has done no more than justice on the present occasion to the happy promptitude of this gentleman with the auspicious name, Mr. Fairbeard.

"Madam," said Mr. Fairbeard, "since you are for the Plain Dealer,' there he is for you," pushing Mr. Wycherley towards her at the same time. "Yes," observed Wycherley, with his usual promptitude and gallantry, "this lady can bear plain-dealing, for she appears to be so accomplished, that what would be compliment addressed to others, would be plain-dealing addressed to her." The countess replied to this sally, with “No truly, Sir, I am not without my faults any more than the rest of my sex; and yet, notwithstanding all my faults, I love plain-dealing, and am never more fond of it than when it tells me of my faults." "Then, Madam," interposed Mr. Fairbeard, who appears to have played his part in the scene with excellent taste and good-humour, "you and the Plain Dealer seem designed by heaven for each other."

The result of this dramatic exordium was the usual termination of comedy,-matrimony; and (as Dennis might have said) something not so pleasant afterwards, at the fall of the curtain. Wycherley waited on the lady, first in Tunbridge, and afterwards at her house in Hatton-garden, and obtaining her affections, is said to have been induced by his father to marry her in secret, for fear of diverting the intentions in his favour at court; a piece of craft, which according to the wonted fashion of that kind of wisdom, ended in producing the very evil which it thought to prevent. The discovery made the king regard the marriage as an act of contumacy, aggravated by disingenuousness,—a conclusion of the very worst sort for poor "manly Wycherley ;" and though it is understood that the royal indignation might have been appeased in time, the Countess completed the apparent contempt of court, by a jealousy which kept the handsome dramatist away from it; not at all approving a place, of the temptations of which she was not ignorant, and which was still presided over by the fair and voluptuous dedicatee of "Love in a Wood."

Our author's consort, in fact, had been a "maid of honour" herself in the very honourable and perilous domain of Whitehall. She was one of the "Mademoiselles Robartes," mentioned in Grammont, daughters of Lord Robartes, afterwards Earl of Radnor. She was married to the Earl of Drogheda during her father's Lord-lieutenancy of Ireland; and in the course of ten years becoming a widow, now occupied a house in the ever-dramatic but then also fashionable quarter of Bow-street, Covent Garden, where she was the glory, plague, and torment of her beloved husband the Plain Dealer. She might still possibly “like to have her faults told her," rather than not be spoken of at all, especially if they came mended by fond lips into virtues; but there were faults of Mr. Wycherley's own, in his past life, perhaps in his present, which she could not construe into virtues by any process of imagination; and the consequence was, that whenever he went to meet his old companions at their favourite tavern in Bow-street, which unfortunately for him was right opposite the house, he was obliged to sit with the windows of the room open, in order that the fair Letitia-Isabella might be assured there was no female in the company!

The disasters arising from this unfortunate marriage did not terminate even with the poor woman's death, which took place before long. She seems really to have loved her husband, as well as such a temper could; and accordingly left him the whole of her fortune; but the title under which he claimed the property was disputed, and the law-expenses resulting threw him into such a series of difficulties, that his father was unable to extricate him, and the luckless dramatist lay in the Fleet prison for seven years! The Radnor family by this time were probably not rich. The Earl, her brother, had married the daughter of Sir John Cutler, the miser, who would not give the new countess a dowry. The sister's fortune may have become of proportionate consequence; and, at all events, Wycherley lost it. In his "Posthumous Works" is a poem addressed to Cutler, banteringly exhorting him to stick to his avarice as the summum bonum; whether in spite to his wife's relations, or in the forlorn hope of shaming away the cause of dispute, it is of course impossible to guess.

It would seem unaccountable that so long a captivity should withhold from the society which he had delighted, an author who was acknowledged to have a good heart, and who was gifted by his

contemporaries with a title to special reputation as a man. But ill-luck, the character of not being worldly wise, perhaps real improvidence, at all events the difficulty of bringing his troubles to a close by one large sum, may naturally have perplexed such friends as an author is likely to have. And even his titled ones may have not been among his richest, considering the wants of their luxury. He told, however, his first biographer, Pack, that the Earl of Mulgrave (Sheffield, afterwards Duke of Buckinghamshire) once lent him five hundred pounds. Why the king did not assist him, perhaps indeed why he withdrew his countenance from him in the first instance, may have been accounted for, not by his marriage, but by the strong partisanship of his attachment to Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, whose side, in the disputes with him at court, even when accused of treason and thrown into the Tower, he took with a fondness of zeal that does credit to both their memories. We learn this characteristic and engaging circumstance from a poem in his folio volume, addressed to the Duke on the occasion, and beginning with this uncompromising verse:

"Your late disgrace was but the court's disgrace."

Manly Wycherley" is conspicuous here, and no less so the reason why he was not likely to enjoy a life-long continuation of the king's favour.

Pack says, that while the author was in the extremest of these troubles, the bookseller, who had profited largely by the sale of the "Plain Dealer," refused to lend him the sum of twenty pounds; a churlishness which, taking for granted honesty on one side, and pecuniary ability on the other, would certainly not have been shown to such a man now-a-days. But whether these stories were true or false, it seems not unlikely that Wycherley would have ended his days in prison, had not Charles's successor, James, happening to witness the performance of the "Plain Dealer," and being struck with the supposed virtues of its hero's character, which touched him on the side of his own claims to sincerity, issued orders for the payment of the author's debts in full, and settled a pension on him besides of two hundred a year, so long as he should reside in England. But in matters of pecuniary trouble, "it never rains but it pours," as the proverb says, come what sunshine there may betwixt. Even under this unlooked-for felicity, Wycherley's ill-luck haunted him in the shape of a bashfulness, which, while it deteriorates from our sense of his "wit," gives him an unexpected addition of good-will in our hearts, at the thought of such childish unworldliness in the "man of the world." He was too modest to state the whole amount of his debts, even to his friend Lord Mulgrave, who was commissioned to learn it; perhaps the more modest, because of his friendship; and the consequence was, an unliquidated balance of liabilities, which still weighed on his mind. Even when the death of his father, at a ripe old age, put him in possession of the family estate,even then, being only a tenant for life, and unable to raise money upon it to a sufficient amount, he obtained but slight relief! and thus the irretrievable difficulty might now be supposed to have reached its climax; but a sense of dramatic surprise mingles with one's pity, at discovering, that the last desperate measure to which he was about to resort for the purpose of delivering himself, did but bind him in new chains for the short remainder of his life, and leave him free from the others, only to see it hasten its termination.

Wycherley had a disagreeable nephew (very disagreeable and unworthy, one should suppose, to be able to disconcert the last days of a man rendered philosophic both by good-nature and misfortune.) This nephew he could not bear to think of succeeding him. We do not very well understand the case, as it is variously related in the biographies; perhaps for want of the due legal knowledge; but it appears, that by a certain combination of law and matrimony, he thought at once to disappoint this nephew, free himself from his other annoyances, and confer, as he fancied, a benefit on a deserving object. He, therefore, almost in articulo mortis, married a young woman whom he supposed possessed of a considerable estate, settled a jointure upon her out of it, and applied a part of the proceeds to his own uses. In vain! He dies eleven days afterwards, in the December of the year 1715, aged 75; and if his spirit were to be supposed cognizant of what was going forward over his coffin, it has been asserted by some biographers, that he would have found his widow an

1

家

impostor, and already in the possession of another man. It is said, that by a truly dramatic close of his existence, he summoned his new wife to him the evening before he expired, and having obtained her consent to a request he was about to make, explained it in the following words :'My dear, it is only this,-that you will never marry an old man again." Here was the ruling passion of wit and humour strong in death; though Pope, adding jest to jest, thinks it hard he should have debarred her from doubling her jointure "on the same easy terms." It does not appear that she would have baulked herself of twenty such. She went by the name of Jackson; and the alleged fellow-swindler, who subsequently married her, called himself Captain Shrimpton. Bethia Shringston was the name of Wycherley's mother. It was through the Captain and Theobald, that the volume of "Posthumous Works," which Pope had had so uneasy a hand in re-touching, came before the public.

Wycherley's remains were deposited in the vault of the church in Covent Garden. Pope affirmed to Spence that he died a "Romanist;" and that he had owned that religion in his hearing. When people have not the very best ideas of this world, nor, consequently perhaps, of the next, it is natural enough that fear on some occasions, and doubt on all, should make them willing to abide by the church that claims to itself exclusively the power of solving all doubt, and delivering from all fear. So Madame de Montausier triumphed at last.

The chain of these melancholy events, so closely linked with one another, has hindered us from speaking till now of the curious intercourse that took place, in his latter days, between Wycherley, the oldest wit of the departing age, and Pope, the youngest of the new. Wycherley, in the year 1704, which was the sixty-fourth year of his age, not being the everlasting young-old boy that Chaucer was, nor of the right faith in things poetical, published a bad volume of poems, full of harsh verses and insipid gallantries; and Pope giving the world his Pastorals about the same time, and being then sixteen to Wycherley's sixty-five, the two books appear to have brought the old wit and the new together. Pope, with the reverence natural to a young writer, diligently cultivated his new acquaintance, haunting his lodgings in town, (following him about, as he describes it, like a dog) and trying to entice him to come and see him in Windsor Forest. (Lady W. Montague says he did it for a legacy; but the charge is manifestly nothing but a bit of the spite and malice, to which her ladyship's fine brain too frequently condescended). Wycherley, on the other hand, always promising to go to the Forest, and always complaining of his irresistible itch of writing, wishes to get up a fresh volume of poems, and compliments his new friend, not yet out of his teens, with asking him to correct his verses. A dangerous compliment! Pope entered upon his task with more sincerity than comfort, asking, among other cavalier inquiries, whether he was to turn the "worst pieces " into "very good ;" and implying, in that case, that it might be necessary to "re-write " them! The old man, unable to deny himself the pleasure of seeing his darling verses trimmed up, yet wincing under the approach of so slashing an instrument, compliments the "great mind' of his critic at the expense of his "little, tender, and crazy body." In short, spleen and impatience break out on both sides in the course of an anxious correspondence, till Pope, with hardly sufficient delicacy of forbearance, testily throws up his office; and though strong expressions of esteem afterwards passed between them through the medium of common friends, the intercourse was never renewed. Of the two, Wycherley appears to us to have been the less in the wrong; but then his experience left him the smaller excuse for not foreseeing the result.

From the letters that passed between Pope and Wycherley, and the recollections of him by the former in Spence, we learn something of the habits and appearance of the dramatist. Pope put him in the list of those who had the "nobleman-look." He did not care for the country; was fond of serious and philosophic authors (Montaigne, Rochefoucault, Seneca, and Gracian), in one of whom he used to "read himself asleep o' nights ;" and was vain of his handsomeness, the departure of which in old age he could so little endure, that he would sigh over the portrait of him at twenty-eight by Sir Peter Lely, and to the engraving made of it in 1703, (from which the one in the present volume is taken) ordered the motto to be put, "Quantum mutatus ab illo," (how changed from [him)" which he used to repeat," says Pope, "with a melancholy emphasis." Sir Godfrey Kneller

xvi

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL NOTICES.

said he would make a very fine head without his wig; but he could not bear and Sir Godfrey was obliged to add the wig. Alas for a Charles-the-Second speaks of a man who was "incapable of his own distress." Here was a man his own venerableness. He retained however to the last, in spite of the oc natural to such a decline (unless Pope's own peevishness found it in his asso had always possessed of good-heartedness and sincerity. His contemporaries being of an intercourse as modest and gentle as his public satire was hold; giving him, as an epithet of distinction, the name of his hero in the Plai cognomen, to which perhaps his personal appearance helped to contribute, "Session of the Poets," designated him as "brawny Wycherley," though th subsequent editions. Dryden, with his usual good-nature towards young autho join him in writing a comedy; but he modestly declined the offer in a poem o It is difficult to say which was the luckier in the failure of this proposal, for the poetical part of Dryden's spirit, especially if he had written in verse, w the unbelieving prose of a man who had no such poetry in him: while, o greater, or at all events purer, dramatic power of Wycherley would not have with the unseasonable and arbitrary superfluities of Dryden.

Wycherley has justly been considered as the earliest of our comic prose d the fleeting shapes of custom and manners that were brought to their gayes the more lasting wit and humour natural to the prevailing qualities of manki "dandy" of the prose drama, and Wycherley the first man. Shadwell had gli but he was only a gross and hasty sketcher. Schlegel has missed a general a of this class, through the whole range of English comedy; and Wycherley is to the defect. He is somewhat heavy as well as "brawny” in his step; and it is seldom from gaiety. He has "wit at will" also; but then the will to be obvious. It has too artificial an air of thought and antithesis. His best sc purposes, mutual exposure, or the contrast of natural with acquired cunnin which reflection and design have much more to do than animal spirits. unaffected; and clearness and force are his characteristics, in preference to w or laughable. We can easily believe him to have been a "slow" writer; not care and consideration.

"Of all our modern wits, none seem to me
Once to have touch'd upon true comedy,
But hasty Shadwell and slow Wycherley."

The truth of the application of this epithet has been controverted, especiall who knew him, and who implies that he contradicts it from personal knowle loss of memory, which he suffered in advanced life, had altered his habit question might appear to be settled by the interlined state in which Theobal were left, and which was so excessive, that a stranger could hardly read them faculties, it is true, in this respect was so great, that Pope says he would c paper and repeat himself, and forget that he had done either in the course the other hand, Rochester's triplet has some more lines to it, not so often quot

"Shadwell's unfinish'd works do yet impart

Great proofs of nature's force, though none of art;
But Wycherley earns hard whate'er he gains,
He wants no judgment, and he spares no pains."

Perhaps Rochester spoke of his younger efforts, and Lansdowne knew him

*An Epistle to Mr. Dryden, occasioned by his desiring to join with him in writing Works, p. 18.

† See the passage in Anderson's British Poets, vol. vii. p. 722.

practice had made him quicker. And yet, as Wycherley was not a writer of impulse, there is something of that kind of simple hardness in his style which looks like a slow growth. Congreve's agglomerations of wit have the same appearance of elaboration, though from another cause. Vanbrugh and Farquhar have more spirits, and a readier air accordingly. But we shall touch upon these comparisons, when we have done speaking of all separately.

We shall now glance at each play of Wycherley's, in the order of its composition.-The idea of "Love in a Wood, or St. James's Park," (for the Park was the wood,) was evidently suggested by the "Mulberry Garden" of Sir Charles Sedley,- -a title suggested by a house of entertainment which stood on the site of Buckingham Palace, and the grounds of which, like the Spring-garden at the opposite corner, were resorted to by the gallants and masked ladies of the time, when they issued forth of a summer's evening like so many gnats, to buzz, sting, and make love. It turns upon a game of hide-and-seek, and other cross-purposes, between some of these "minions of the moon," and is worth little in style or plot; yet we think, upon the whole, it has been undervalued. It is not unamusing. It gives early evidence of that dislike of backbiting and false friendship, which honourably distinguished Wycherley through life; and there are the germs of two characters in it, which have been since developed by Hoadley and Sheridan,—that of Falkland in the "Rivals" (the Valentine of this play) and Ranger in the "Suspicious Husband;" whose name, with a candour that was to be expected from Hoadley's superior nature, was retained by him from the Ranger of Wycherley. Compare, in particular, the immense yet pleasant impudence, and reconciling animal spirits, of the entrance of Hoadley's Ranger into the bedroom of Mrs. Strickland, with its manifest prototype in the second act of "Love in a Wood." The concluding stanza of the song in the first act contains the passage which is said to have been the origin of the writer's acquaintance with the Duchess of Cleveland.

Either Wycherley's memory must have failed him as to the early period of some of his compositions, or vanity helped to mislead it,—for he had manifestly gone to the same sources as Molière for the improvement of his plots, when he wrote the "Gentleman Dancing-Master." There is a similar amusing intrigue in it to that of the "Ecole des Femmes," carried on through the medium of an unconscious wittol, who hugs himself upon the fool he is making of the favoured lover; and the author, besides looking back to old English comedy for a Frenchified Englishman, has brought a formalised one from Spain, the favourite store-house of the comedy of the preceding age. The hero of the piece, who is made to personate a dancing-master, and to be always in motion whether he will or no, is very amusing; so is the suspicious old aunt, who sees through his incompetency: but, above all, there is an exquisite truth to nature in the egotistical effrontery of the father, who, after treating the aunt's suspicions with contempt, takes to himself the credit of making the very discovery, which she has all along been trying to beat into his head.

The "Plain Dealer,"-with the exquisite addition of the litigious Widow Blackacre, a kind of born female barrister, an original which he had doubtless met with in the courts of law, is an English version, in its principal characteristics, of the "Misanthrope" of Molière, greatly improved, inasmuch as the hero is less poetically tragic, but equally contrary to nature and to the true spirit of comedy, inasmuch as he is tragical at all; and in one respect it is shockingly below the original; for it is deformed so as no other age but such a one as that of Charles the Second could suppose manhood to be deformed, and yet remain consistent with itself, by the sort of revenge which he permits himself to take on his mistress,—that of a possession of her person under the supposition of his being another man, and while he feels nothing for her disposition but hatred and contempt. Yet in this gusto of desecrated animal passion, fit only for some ferocious sensualist who believed himself as great a rascal as he thought everybody else, the wits of those days saw nothing to deteriorate from a character emphatically christened and thought "Manly,"-a name which it imparted, as an epithet of honour, to the Author himself. As to the rest, the wit put into the mouth of this muchinjured Captain of the British navy is as forced, and not seldom as common-place, as the violent and solemn coxcombry of his hatred of all other vices but his own is ridiculous. Indeed all misanthropes, whatever be their pretensions in other respects, nay, in very proportion to their claims upon