characters the direct and strong influence of Molière is evident. Dryden and others borrowed from Molière; Wycherley was, in a way, inspired by him. He had not Molière's rare genius, and could not reproduce the masterly simplicity and ease of dialogue that is witty, and wise too, in every turn, while yet so natural as to show no trace of a strain for effect; that is nowhere fettered to a false conventionality, but so paints humors of life as to be good reading forever, alike to the strong men and to girls and boys. Our English writers of the prose comedy of manners cannot claim readers, like Molière, from civilized Europe in all after-time; but, as compared with other English dramatists of their own time, they did widen the range of character-painting-witness the widow Blackacre and her law-suit in "The Plain Dealer" and they did take pains to put substance of wit into their dialogue. Four dramatists are the chiefs of this school of prose comedy-Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar. Of these Wycherley came first, and wrote his four plays in the reign of Charles II. His last play was acted sixteen years before the first of Congreve's. Congreve's plays were all produced in the reign of William III., and those of Vanbrugh and Farquhar in the reigns of William and of Queen Anne.

27. William Congreve was of a Staffordshire family, and born in 1670. He was educated at Kilkenny and at Trinity College, Dublin; entered the Middle Temple; in 1693 published a novel, "Incognita; or, Love and Duty Reconciled," and at Drury Lane produced his play of "The Old Bachelor," which he professed to have written several years before "to amuse himself in a slow recovery from sickness." The success of the play was great, and it caused Charles Montague, then a Lord of the Treasury, to make Congreve a commissioner for licensing hackney-coaches. In the following year, 1694, Congreve produced, with much less success, "The Double Dealer." The two theatres at Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn had joined their forces about 1682, and there was then only one great theatre, that at Drury Lane, with Thomas Betterton the greatest of its actors. Irritated by the patentees

at Drury Lane, Betterton, then a veteran actor, sixty years old, seceded. He carried other good players with him, as well as the new dramatist, and obtained a patent for a new theatre, which opened in Lincoln's Inn Fields, in 1695, with Congreve's comedy of "Love for Love." This had a brilliant success, and the company gave Congreve a share in the new house, on condition of his writing them a play a year if his health allowed. His next play appeared in 1697. It was his only tragedy, "The Mourning Bride," the most successful of his pieces. Afterwards, he wrote "The Way of the World," a comedy; "The Judgment of Paris," a masque; and "Semele," an opera; and in 1710, he published a complete edition of his works in three volumes. He died in 1729.

28. Sir John Vanbrugh, born in 1666, was of a family that had lived near Ghent before the persecutions by the Duke of Alva. His grandfather came to England, and his father acquired wealth as a sugar-baker. After a liberal education, finished in France, Vanbrugh was for a time in the army, and in 1695 he was nominated by John Evelyn as secretary to the Commission for endowing Greenwich Hospital. His "Relapse," produced in 1697, was followed by "The Provoked Wife," produced in 1698 at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Other plays of his are 66 Æsop," "The Pilgrim," "The False Friend," "The Confederacy," and "The Country House." He attained great note both as a dramatist and as an architect; was knighted; and died in 1726.

29. George Farquhar, the son of a poor clergyman, was born at Londonderry in 1678. He left Trinity College, Dublin, to turn actor for a short time on the Dublin stage, came young to London, and got a commission in a regiment under Lord Orrery's command in Ireland. Young Captain Farquhar was but twenty, when, in 1698, his first play, "Love and a Bottle," won success. Congreve's plays were the wittiest produced by writers of the new comedy of manners, but their keenness and fine polish were least relieved by any sense of right. Vanbrugh's style was less artificial and his plots were simpler, but his ready wit and coarse strength were as far as Congreve's finer work from touching the essentials of life. Farquhar had

a generosity of character that humanized the persons of his drama with many traces of good feeling. He produced his "Inconstant" in 1703, "The Twin Rivals" in 1705, "The Recruiting Officer" in 1706, and his last and best play, "The Beaux Stratagem," written in six weeks when he was dying. He died, but twenty-nine years old, during the height of its success. A woman who loved Farquhar had entrapped him into marriage by pretending to possess a fortune. When undeceived, he never in his life reproached her. From his death-bed he commended his two helpless daughters to his friend Wilks, the actor, who got them a benefit. His widow died in extreme poverty. One of his daughters married a poor tradesman, the other became a maid-servant.

30. Thomas Southern, whom Dryden afterwards commended for his purity, was born in Ireland in 1660. He came to London in 1678, and at the age of eighteen entered the Middle Temple. He was but twenty-two when, in 1682, his tragedy of "The Loyal Brother; or, the Persian Prince," was acted. The controversy over the succession of the king's brother then ran high, and Southern, taking the side of the court, meant his play, of which the plot was from a novel, "Tachmas, Prince of Persia," to be taken as a compliment to James, Duke of York. It was followed, in 1684, by a comedy, "The Disappointment; or, the Mother in Fashion," which had a plot taken from the novel in "Don Quixote" of "The Curious Impertinent." Southern's best plays, both tragedies, were produced in the reign of William III.; "The Fatal Marriage," in 1694, and "Oroonoko," founded on Mrs. Behn's novel, in 1696. The play added new strength to the protest of the novel against slavery. Southern was an amlable man and a good economist. By his commissions in the army, which he entered early in James II.'s reign, his good business management as a dramatist, and careful investment of his money, he became rich, and lived to be a well-to-do, white-haired old gentleman, who died at the age of eighty-six in the year 1746. He was the introducer of the author's second and third night, which raised his profit from the players, and he was not above active soliciting, which brought in money from bountiful patrons of the theatre to whom he sold his tickets. He contrived even to make a bookseller pay a hundred and fifty pounds for the right of publishing one of his plays. When Dryden once asked him how much he made by a play, he owned, to Dryden's great astonishment, that by his last play he had made seven hundred pounds. Dryden himself had been often content to earn a hundred.

31. It was in the year 1679, that John Oldham wrote his satires on the Jesuits. He was born in 1653, son of a Nonconformist minister at

Shipton, Gloucestershire. Oldham went to St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, and returned home, after taking his B.A. degree, in 1674. He became usher in a school at Croydon. Verse written by him found its way to the Earls of Rochester and Dorset, and to Sir Charles Sedley, who astonished the poor usher by paying him a visit. He became tutor to two grandsons of Sir Edwards Thurland, a judge living near Reigate, and then to the son of a Sir William Hickes, near London. This occupation over, he lived among the wits in London; was remembered as the poetical usher by Sedley and Dorset; was on affectionate terms with Dryden; and found a patron in the Earl of Kingston, with whom he was domesticated, at Holme Pierrepoint, when he died of small-pox, in December, 1683, aged thirty. His chief production was the set of four "Satyrs upon the Jesuits," modelled variously on Persius, Horace, Buchanan's "Franciscan," and the speech of Sylla's ghost at the opening of Ben Jonson's "Catiline." The vigor of his wit produced a bold piece of irony in an "Ode against Virtue," and its "Counterpart," an ode in Virtue's praise, with many short satires and odes, -one in high admiration of Ben Jonson, - paraphrases and translations. There is a ring of friendship in the opening of Dryden's lines upon young Oldham's death before time had added the full charm of an English style to the strength of wit in his verse:

--

"Farewell! too little and too lately known,

Whom I began to think and call my own;

For sure our souls were near allied, and thine
Cast in the same poetic mould with mine."

32. Nahum Tate, joint author with Dryden of the Second Part of "Absalom and Achitophel," was born in Dublin, in 1652, the son of Dr. Faithful Tate, and educated at Trinity College there. He came to London, published in 1677 a volume of "Poems," and between that date and 1682 had produced the tragedies of "Brutus of Alba" and "The Loyal General; Richard II.; or, the Sicilian Usurper;" an altered version of Shakespeare's "King Lear;" and an application of "Coriolanus " to court politics of the day, as "The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth; or, The Fall of Coriolanus." Tate wrote three other plays before the Revolution. It was not till 1696 that he produced, with Dr. Nicholas Brady (b. 1659, d. 1726), also an Irishman, and then chaplain to William III., a New Version of the Psalms of David;" and in 1707 one more tragedy of his was acted, "Injured Love; or, The Cruel Husband." In 1692, Tate became poet-laureate, and remained laureate during the rest of Dryden's life, and throughout Queen Anne's reign.

verse.

33. George Stepney (b. 1663, d. 1707), wrote pleasant occasional He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and owed his political employment after the Revolution to the warm friendship of a fellow-student, Charles Montague, afterwards Lord Halifax.

34. Thomas Creech, born in 1659, near Sherborne, Dorset, studied

Sherborge,

at Wadham College, Oxford, and got a fellowship for his translation of Lucretius, published in 1682. In 1684, the year of the first volume of Miscellany Poems, Creech published a verse translation of the Odes, Satires, and Epistles of Horace, which did not sustain his credit, though he applied the satires to his own times. The end of his life was, that, in 1701, Wadham College presented him to the rectory of Welwyn, and he hanged himself in his study before going to reside there. Richard Duke, also a clergyman, was a friend of Otway's, and tutor to the Duke of Richmond. He was part author of translations of Ovid and Juvenal, and also wrote original verses. He died in 1711, as Prebendary of Gloucester.

35. Sir Samuel Garth, born of a good Yorkshire family about 1660, became M.D. of Cambridge in 1691, and Fellow of the London College of Physicians in 1693. He was a very kindly man, who throve both as wit and as physician; and he acquired fame by a mock-heroic poem, "The Dispensary," first published in 1699. The College of Physicians had, in 1687, required all its fellows and licentiates to give gratuitous advice to the poor. The high price of medicine was still an obstacle to charity; and after a long battle within the profession, the physicians raised, in 1696, a subscription among themselves for the establishment of a dispensary within the college, at which only the first cost of medicines would be charged to the poor in making up gratuitous prescriptions. The squabble raised over this scheme, chiefly between physicians and apothecaries, Garth, who was one of its promoters, celebrated in his clever mock-heroic poem. It was suggested to him, as he admitted, by Boileau's mock-heroic, "Le Lutrin," first published in 1674, which had for its theme a hot dispute between the treasurer and precentor of the Sainte Chapelle at Paris over the treasurer's wish to change the position of a pulpit. Garth, a good Whig, was knighted on the accession of George I., and was made one of the physicians in ordinary to the king. He wrote other verse, and died in 1719.

36. John Pomfret, who died in 1703, aged thirty-six, was Rector of Malden, and son of the Rector of Luton, both in Bedfordshire. His "Poems" appeared in 1699, the chief of them a smooth picture of happy life, "The Choice," first published as "by a Person of Quality." As one part of "The Choice was "I'd have no Wife," it was promptly replied to with "The Virtuous Wife; a Poem." William Walsh (b. 1663, d. 1708), whom Dryden, and afterwards Pope, honored as friend and critic, was the son of a gentleman of Worcestershire. He wrote verse, liked poets, was a man of fashion, and sat for his own county in several Parliaments. He published, in 1691, a prose “Dialogue concerning Women, being a Defence of the Fair Sex, addressed to Eugenia." William King (b. 1663, d. 1712) was born in London to a good estate, graduated at Oxford, became D.C.L. in 1692, and an advocate at Doctors' Commons. He acquired under William III. and Queen Anne the reputation of a witty poet, who idly wasted high abilities and good aids to ad