es purely, and he writes purely, in the simplest language, the
simplest of French verse. The source of his wit is clear reason: it is a
fountain of that soil; and it springs to vindicate reason, common-sense,
rightness and justice; for no vain purpose ever. The wit is of such
pervading spirit that it inspires a pun with meaning and interest. {5}
His moral does not hang like a tail, or preach from one character
incessantly cocking an eye at the audience, as in recent realistic French
Plays: but is in the heart of his work, throbbing with every pulsation of
an organic structure. If Life is likened to the comedy of Moliere, there
is no scandal in the comparison.

Congreve's Way of the World is an exception to our other comedies, his
own among them, by virtue of the remarkable brilliancy of the writing,
and the figure of Millamant. The comedy has no idea in it, beyond the
stale one, that so the world goes; and it concludes with the jaded
discovery of a document at a convenient season for the descent of the
curtain. A plot was an afterthought with Congreve. By the help of a
wooden villain (Maskwell) marked Gallows to the flattest eye, he gets a
sort of plot in The Double Dealer. {6} His Way of the World might be
called The Conquest of a Town Coquette, and Millamant is a perfect
portrait of a coquette, both in her resistance to Mirabel and the manner
of her surrender, and also in her tongue. The wit here is not so salient
as in certain passages of Love for Love, where Valentine feigns madness
or retorts on his father, or Mrs. Frail rejoices in the harmlessness of
wounds to a woman's virtue, if she 'keeps them from air.' In The Way of
the World, it appears less prepared in the smartness, and is more
diffused in the more characteristic style of the speakers. Here, however,
as elsewhere, his famous wit is like a bully-fencer, not ashamed to lay
traps for its exhibition, transparently petulant for the train between
certain ordinary words and the powder-magazine of the improprieties to be
fired. Contrast the wit of Congreve with Moliere's. That of the first is
a Toledo blade, sharp, and wonderfully supple for steel; cast for
duelling, restless in the scabbard, being so pretty when out of it. To
shine, it must have an adversary. Moliere's wit is like a running brook,
with innumerable fresh lights on it at every turn of the wood through
which its business is to find a way. It does not run in search of
obstructions, to be noisy over t