atitude by a
despicable effusion of elegiack pastoral; a composition in which all is
unnatural, and yet nothing is new.

In another year, 1695, his prolifick pen produced Love for Love; a
comedy of nearer alliance to life, and exhibiting more real manners than
either of the former. The character of Foresight was then common. Dryden
calculated nativities; both Cromwell and king William had their lucky
days; and Shaftesbury himself, though he had no religion, was said to
regard predictions. The Sailor is not accounted very natural, but he is
very pleasant.

With this play was opened the new theatre, under the direction of
Betterton the tragedian; where he exhibited, two years afterwards, 1697,
the Mourning Bride, a tragedy, so written as to show him sufficiently
qualified for either kind of dramatick poetry.

In this play, of which, when he afterwards revised it, he reduced the
versification to greater regularity, there is more bustle than
sentiment; the plot is busy and intricate, and the events take hold on
the attention; but, except a very few passages, we are rather amused
with noise, and perplexed with stratagem, than entertained with any true
delineation of natural characters. This, however, was received with more
benevolence than any other of his works, and still continues to be acted
and applauded.

But whatever objections may be made, either to his comick or tragick
excellence, they are lost, at once, in the blaze of admiration, when it
is remembered that he had produced these four plays before he had passed
his twenty-fifth year; before other men, even such as are some time to
shine in eminence, have passed their probation of literature, or presume
to hope for any other notice than such as is bestowed on diligence and
inquiry. Among all the efforts of early genius which literary history
records, I doubt whether any one can be produced that more surpasses the
common limits of nature than the plays of Congreve.

About this time began the long-continued controversy between Collier and
the poets. In the reign of Charles the first the puritans had raised a
violent clamour against the drama, which they considered as an
entertainment not lawful to christians, an opinion held by them in
common with the church of Rome; and Prynne published Histriomastix, a
huge volume, in which stageplays were censured. The outrages and crimes
of the puritans brought afterwards their whole system of doctrine into
disrepute, and fro