ng a comedy! Doesn't it sound like a
fable, that place in the Pipe-office?(59) _Ah, l'heureux temps que celui
de ces fables!_ Men of letters there still be: but I doubt whether any
Pipe-offices are left. The public has smoked them long ago.

Words, like men, pass current for a while with the public, and being known
everywhere abroad, at length take their places in society; so even the
most secluded and refined ladies here present will have heard the phrase
from their sons or brothers at school, and will permit me to call William
Congreve, Esquire, the most eminent literary "swell" of his age. In my
copy of _Johnson's Lives_ Congreve's wig is the tallest, and put on with
the jauntiest air of all the laurelled worthies. "I am the great Mr.
Congreve," he seems to say, looking out from his voluminous curls. People
called him the great Mr. Congreve.(60) From the beginning of his career
until the end everybody admired him. Having got his education in Ireland,
at the same school and college with Swift, he came to live in the Middle
Temple, London, where he luckily bestowed no attention to the law; but
splendidly frequented the coffee-houses and theatres, and appeared in the
side-box, the tavern, the Piazza, and the Mall, brilliant, beautiful, and
victorious from the first. Everybody acknowledged the young chieftain. The
great Mr. Dryden(61) declared that he was equal to Shakespeare, and
bequeathed to him his own undisputed poetical crown, and writes of him,
"Mr. Congreve has done me the favour to review the _Aeneis_, and compare
my version with the original. I shall never be ashamed to own that this
excellent young man has showed me many faults which I have endeavoured to
correct."

The "excellent young man" was but three- or four-and-twenty when the great
Dryden thus spoke of him: the greatest literary chief in England, the
veteran field-marshal of letters, himself the marked man of all Europe,
and the centre of a school of wits, who daily gathered round his chair and
tobacco-pipe at Will's. Pope dedicated his _Iliad_ to him;(62) Swift,
Addison, Steele, all acknowledge Congreve's rank, and lavish compliments
upon him. Voltaire went to wait upon him as on one of the Representatives
of Literature--and the man who scarce praises any other living person, who
flung abuse at Pope, and Swift, and Steele, and Addison--the Grub Street
Timon, old John Dennis,(63) was hat in hand to Mr. Congreve; and said,
that when he retired from the