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his importance should now be confined to the exercise of offices so gentle. Dennis informs us, that immediately after Wycherley had received the intimation we have. mentioned from Charles the Second, relative to the tutorship of his son, he went down to Tunbridge, most likely for the purpose of refreshing himself with the ordinary attractions of the place; when promenading one day at the Wells with his friend Mr. Fairbeard, of Gray's Inn, it happened, just as he arrived at the bookseller's shop, that the Countess of Drogheda, a widow, young, handsome, and rich, came into it also, and inquired of the bookseller for the "Plain Dealer." The rest of the story shall be told in the words of its latest and best repeater, Mr. Bell, who, if we venture to think him inclined now and then to be over-thankful 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.

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"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 plaindealing, 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."

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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; 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.

a man.

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 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 book

seller, 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 unlookedfor 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 goodwill 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.

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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 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:- 66 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

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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.

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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 said he would make a very fine head without his wig; but he could not bear the portrait when done, and Sir Godfrey was obliged to add the wig. Alas for a Charles-the-Second old age! Shakspeare speaks of a man who was "incapable of his own distress." Here was a man who was unequal to his own venerableness. He retained however to the last, in spite of the occasional "peevishness" natural to such a decline (unless Pope's own peevishness found it in his associate) the character he had always possessed of good-heartedness and sincerity. His contemporaries have recorded him ⚫as being of an intercourse as modest and gentle as his public satire was bold; and they all agreed in giving him, as an epithet of distinction, the name of his hero in the Plain Dealer, "Manly,"-a cognomen, to which perhaps his personal appearance helped to contribute, for Rochester, in his "Session of the Poets," designated him as "brawny Wycherley," though the word was omitted in subsequent editions. Dryden, with his usual good-nature towards young authors, once invited him to join him in writing a comedy; but he modestly declined the offer in a poem of grateful panegyric*.

It is difficult to say which was the luckier in the failure of this proposal, Dryden or Wycherley; for the poetical part of Dryden's spirit, especially if he had written in verse, would have borne down the unbelieving prose of a man who had no such poetry in him while, on the other hand, the greater, or at all events purer, dramatic power of Wycherley would not have known what to be at with the unseasonable and arbitrary superfluities of Dryden.

Wycherley has justly been considered as the earliest of our comic prose dramatists, who forsook the fleeting shapes of custom and manners that were brought to their gayest head in Etherege, for the more lasting wit and humour natural to the prevailing qualities of mankind. Etherege was the "dandy" of the prose drama, and Wycherley the first man. Shadwell had glimpses "in his drink;" but he was only a gross and hasty sketcher. Schlegel has missed a general airiness in all our plays of this class, through the whole range of English comedy, and Wycherley is certainly no exception to the defect. He is somewhat heavy as well as "brawny" in his step; and when he moves faster, it is seldom from gaiety. He has "wit at will" also, but then the will to be witty is frequently too obvious, and has too artificial an air of thought and antithesis. His best scenes are those of cross-purposes, mutual exposure, or the contrast of natural with acquired cunning; those, in short, in which reflection and design have much more

"An Epistle to Mr. Dryden, occasioned by his desiring to join with him in writing a Comedy." Posthumous Works, p. 18.

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