better, _Way of the World_, but no more _Love for Loves_. Not to
anticipate a later division of the subject, it may be said here that a
man of thirty, of a fine intellect and a fine taste, of a languid habit
withal, and with an invalided constitution, while he might repeat the
triumphs of diction and intellect of _The Way of the World_, was most
unlikely to return to the broader humours and the more popular gaiety of
the other play. Congreve, like Rochester before him, despised the
judgment of the town in these matters, but by the town he would have to
be judged.

He was a witty, handsome man of the world, of imperturbable temper and
infinite tact, who could make and keep the friendship of very various
men, and be intimate with a woman without quarrelling with her lovers. He
had a taste for pictures and a love for music. He must have hated
violence and uproar, and liked the finer shades of life. He wore the
mode of his day, and was free from the superficial protests of the narrow-
minded. Possibly not a very 'definite portrait,' possibly a very
negative characterisation. Possibly, also, a tolerably sure foundation
for a structure of sympathetic imagination.

IV.

Passing from necessarily vague and not obviously pertinent remarks to
criticism, which may fairly be less diffident, we leave Congreve's life
and come to his work, to his 'tawdry playhouse taper,' as Thackeray
called it. It is only after the man has appeared that we recognise that
he came at the hour; but the nature of the hour is in this case not
difficult to be discerned. The habit of playgoing was well-established;
the turmoil of the Revolution was over; De Jure was at a comfortable
distance, and De Facto's wife was a patroness of the arts. But playgoers
had but to be shown something better than that they had, to discover that
the convention of the Restoration needed new blood. A justification of
its choice of material has been attempted: there is no inconsistency in
affirming that the tendency to use it with a mere monotony of ribaldry
was emphatic. Of this tendency the most notable and useful illustration
is Wycherley, because in point of wit and dramatic skill he dwarfed his
colleagues. As Mr. Swinburne has said, the art of Congreve is different
in kind, not merely in degree, from the cruder and more boisterous
product of the 'brawny' dramatist. Happily, however, for his success,
the difference was not instantly clear. His first pla