The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Double-Dealer, by William Congreve,
Edited by G. S. Street

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Title: The Double-Dealer

Author: William Congreve

Editor: G. S. Street

Release Date: January 7, 2008 [eBook #1191]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOUBLE-DEALER***

Transcribed from the 1895 Methuen and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org

THE DOUBLE-DEALER
A COMEDY

_Interdum tamen et vocem Comoedia tollit_.--HOR. _Ar. Po._

_Huic equidem consilio palmam do_: _hic me magnifice_
_effero_, _qui vim tantam in me et potestatem habeam_
_tantae astutiae_, _vera dicendo ut eos ambos fallam_.

SYR. in TERENT. _Heaut_.

TO THE
RIGHT HONOURABLE CHARLES MONTAGUE,
ONE OF THE LORDS OF THE TREASURY.

Sir,--I heartily wish this play were as perfect as I intended it, that it
might be more worthy your acceptance, and that my dedication of it to you
might be more becoming that honour and esteem which I, with everybody who
is so fortunate as to know you, have for you. It had your countenance
when yet unknown; and now it is made public, it wants your protection.

I would not have anybody imagine that I think this play without its
faults, for I am conscious of several. I confess I designed (whatever
vanity or ambition occasioned that design) to have written a true and
regular comedy, but I found it an undertaking which put me in mind of
_Sudet multum_, _frustraque laboret ausus idem_. And now, to make amends
for the vanity of such a design, I do confess both the attempt and the
imperfect performance. Yet I must take the boldness to say I have not
miscarried in the whole, for the mechanical part of it is regular. That
I may say with as little vanity as a builder may say he has built a house
according to the model laid down before him, or a gardener that he has
set his flowers in a knot of such or such a figure. I designed the moral
first, and to that moral I invented the fable, and do not know that I
have borrowed one hint of it anywhere. I made the plot as strong as I
could because it was single, and I made it single because I would