was a wicked old man ; for, when sixty-four years of age, he published a miscellany of verses of which Macaulay says: "The style and versification are beneath criticism: the morals are those of Rochester." And yet it is sad to be obliged to say that his characters pleased the age, because such men and women really lived then, and acted just as he describes them. He depicted vice to applaud and not to punish it. Wycherley was born in 1640, and died in 1715.

CONGREVE.

William Congreve, who is of the same school of morals, is far superior as a writer; indeed, were one name to be selected in illustration of our subject, it would be his. He was born in 1666, and, after being educated at Trinity College, Dublin, was a student at the Middle Temple. His first play, The Old Bachelor, produced in his twenty-first year, was a great success, and won for him the patronage of Lord Halifax. His next, The Double Dealer, caused Dryden to proclaim him the equal of Shakspeare! Perhaps his most famous comedy is Love for Love, which is besides an excellent index to the morality of the age. The author was quoted and caressed; Pope dedicated to him his Translation of the Iliad; and Voltaire considered him the most successful English writer of comedy. His merit consists in some degree of originality, and in the liveliness of his colloquies. His wit is brilliant and flashing, but, in the words of Thackeray, the world to him " seems to have had no moral at all."

How much he owed to the French school, and especially to Molière, may be judged from the fact that a whole scene in Love for Love is borrowed from the Don Juan of Molière. It is that in which Trapland comes to collect his debt from Valentine Legend. Readers of Molière will recall the scene between Don Juan, Sganarelle and M. Dimanche, which is here, with change of names, taken almost word for word. His men are gallants neither from love or passion, but from the custom of the age, of which it is said, "it would break

Mr. Tattle's heart to think anybody else should be beforehand with him;" and Mr. Tattle was the type of a thousand fine gentlemen in the best English society of that day.

His only tragedy, The Mourning Bride, although far below. those of Shakspeare, is the best of that age; and Dr. Johnson says he would go to it to find the most poetical paragraph in the range of English poetry. Congreve died in 1729, leaving his gains to the Duchess of Marlborough, who cherished his memory in a very original fashion. She had a statue of him in ivory, which went by clockwork, and was daily seated at her table; and another wax-doll imitation, whose feet she caused to be blistered and anointed by physicians, as the poet's gouty extremities had been.

Congreve was not ashamed to vindicate the drama, licentious as it was. In the year 1698, Jeremy Collier, a distinguished nonjuring clergyman, published A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage; a very vigorous and severe criticism, containing a great deal of wholesome but bitter truth. Congreve came to the defence of the stage, and his example was followed by his brother dramatists. But Collier was too strong for his enemies, and the defences were very weak. There yet existed in England that leaven of purity which has steadily since been making its influence felt.

VANBRUGH. Sir John Vanbrugh (born in 1666, died in 1726) was an architect as well as a dramatist, but not great in either rôle. His principal dramas are The Provoked Wife, The City Wives' Confederacy, and The Journey to London (finished by Colley Cibber). His personages are vicious and lewd, but quite real; and his wit is constant and flowing. The Provoked Wife is so licentious a play that it is supposed Vanbrugh afterwards conceived and began his Provoked Husband to make some amends for it. This latter play, however, he did not complete: it was finished after his death by Cibber, who says in the Prologue:

This play took birth from principles of truth,
To make amends for errors past of youth.

Though vice is natural, 't was never meant

The stage should show it but for punishment.

Warm with such thoughts, his muse once more took flame,
Resolved to bring licentious life to shame.

If Vanbrugh was not born in France, it is certain that he spent many years there, and there acquired the taste and handling of the comic drama, which then had its halcyon days under Molière. His dialogue is very spirited, and his humor is greater than that of Congreve, who, however, excelled him in wit.

The principal architectural efforts of Vanbrugh were the design for Castle Howard, and the palace of Blenheim, built for Marlborough by the English nation, both of which are greater titles to enduring reputation than any of his plays.

FARQUHAR.George Farquhar was born in Londonderry, in 1678, and began his studies at Trinity College, Dublin, but was soon stage-struck, and became an actor. Not long after, he was commissioned in the army, and began to write plays in the style and moral tone of the age. Among his nine comedies, those which present that tone best are his Love in a Bottle, The Constant Couple, The Recruiting Officer, and The Beaux' Stratagem. All his productions were hastily written, but met with great success from their gayety and clever plots, especially the last two mentioned, which are not, besides, so immoral as the others, and which are yet acted upon the British stage.

ETHEREGE. Sir George Etherege, a coxcomb and a diplomatist, was born in 1636, and died in 1694. His plays are, equally with the others mentioned, marked by the licentiousness of the age, which is rendered more insidious by their

elegance. Among them are The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub, and The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter.

TRAGEDY.

The domain of tragedy, although perhaps not so attractive to the English people as comedy, was still sufficiently so to invite the attention of the literati. The excitement which is produced by exaggerated scenes of distress and death has always had a charm for the multitude; and although the principal tragedies of this period are based upon heroic stories, many of them of classic origin, the genius of the writer displayed itself in applying these to his own times, and in introducing that "touch of nature" which "makes the whole world kin." Human sympathy is based upon a community of suffering, and the sorrows of one age are similar to those of another. Besides, tragedy served, in the period of which we are speaking, to give variety and contrast to what would otherwise have been the gay monotony of the comic muse.

OTWAY. The first writer to be mentioned in this field is Thomas Otway (born in 1651, died in 1685). He led an irregular and wretched life, and died, it is said, from being choked by a roll of bread which, after great want, he was eating too ravenously.

His style is extravagant, his pathos too exacting, and his delineation of the passions sensational and overwrought. He produced in his earlier career Alcibiades and Don Carlos, and, later, The Orphan, and The Soldier's Fortune. But the piece by which his fame was secured is Venice Preserved, which, based upon history, is fictional in its details. The original story is found in the Abbé de St. Real's Histoire de la Conjuration du Marquis de Bedamar, or the account of a Spanish conspiracy in which the marquis, who was ambassador, took part. It is still put upon the stage, with the omis sion, however, of the licentious comic portions found in the original play.

NICHOLAS ROWE, who was born in 1673, a man of fortune and a government official, produced seven tragedies, of which The Fair Penitent, Lady Jane Grey, and Jane Shore are the best. His description of the lover, in the first, has become a current phrase: "That haughty, gallant, gay Lothario," — the prototype of false lovers since. The plots are too broad, but the moral of these tragedies is in most cases good.

In Jane Shore, he has followed the history of the royal mistress, and has given a moral lesson of great efficacy.

NATHANIEL LEE, 1657-1692: was a man of dissolute life, for some time insane, and met his death in a drunken brawl. Of his ten tragedies, the best are The Rival Queens, and Theodosius, or The Force of Love. The rival queens of Alexander the Great-Roxana and Statira figure in the first, which is still presented upon the stage. It has been called, with just critical point, "A great and glorious flight of a bold but frenzied imagination, having as much absurdity as sublimity, and as much extravagance as passion; the poet, the genius, the scholar are everywhere visible."

THOMAS SOUTHERN, 1659-1746: wrote Isabella, or The Fatal Marriage, and Oronooko. In the latter, although yielding to the corrupt taste of the time in his comic parts, he causes his captive Indian prince to teach that period a lesson by his pure and noble love for Imoinda. Oronooko is a prince taken by the English at Surinam and carried captive to England.

These writers are the best representatives of those who in tragedy and comedy form the staple of that age. Their models were copied in succeeding years; but, with the expulsion of the Stuarts, morals were somewhat mended; and while light, gay, and witty productions for the stage were still in demand, the extreme licentiousness was repudiated by the public; and the plays of Cibber, Cumberland, Colman, and Sheridan, reflecting these better tastes, are free from much of the pollution to which we have referred.