y links him with
Wycherley, not with that rare and faint embryo of the later Congreve,
George Etherege. 'You was always a gentleman, Mr. George,' as the valet
says in _Beau Austin_. Happily for his popularity Congreve first
followed the more popular man. It is not, indeed, until he wrote his
last play that he was a whole Etherege idealised, albeit a greater than
Etherege in the meantime. The peculiar effect which Etherege achieved in
_Sir Fopling Flutter_--at whom and with whom you laugh at once--was not
sublimated (the fineness left, the faintness become firmness) until
Congreve created Witwoud, the inimitable, in _The Way of the World_.

At the very first Congreve had good fortune in his players. It was a
brave time for them. True, their salaries were not wonderfully large.
Colley Cibber complains of the days before the revolt in 1694: 'at what
unequal salaries the hired actors were held by the absolute authority of
their frugal masters, the patentees.' But the example was not faded of
those gay days when they were the pets of the most artistic court that
England has known: when great ladies carried Kynaston in his woman's
dress to Hyde Park after the play, and the King was the most persistent
and the most interested playgoer in his realm. They were not thus petted
for irrelevant reasons--for their respectability, their piety, or their
domestic virtues; and their recognition as artists by an artistic society
did not spoil their art. When Congreve started on his course of play-
writing, Queen Mary kept up, in a measure, the amiable custom of her
uncle. He was very fortunate in his casts. There was Betterton, first
of all, the versatile, the restrained, and, witness everybody, the
incomparable. There was Underhill, 'a correct and natural comedian'--one
must quote Cibber pretty often in this connexion--not well suited, one
must suppose, to play Setter to Betterton's Heartwell in _The Old
Bachelor_, but by reason of his admirable assumption of stupidity to make
an excellent Sir Sampson in _Love for Love_. There were Powel, Williams,
Verbruggen, Bowen, and Dogget (Fondlewife in the first play: afterwards
Ben Legend, a part which made his fame and turned his head)--all notable
comedians. Kynaston, graceful in old age as he had been beautiful in
youth, was not in _The Old Bachelor_, but created Lord Touchwood in _The
Double-Dealer_. Mountfort had been murdered by my Lord Mohun, and Leigh
had followed him to the