inished specimen of those talents and
accomplishments for which her race was celebrated. The young foreigner
was introduced to the splendid circle which surrounded the duchess, and
there he appears to have learned some good and some evil. In a few years
he returned to his country a fine gentleman and a Papist. His
conversion, it may safely be affirmed, was the effect, not of any strong
impression on his understanding or feelings, but partly of intercourse
with an agreeable society in which the Church of Rome was the fashion,
and partly of that aversion to Calvinistic austerities which was then
almost universal among young Englishmen of parts and spirit, and which,
at one time, seemed likely to make one half of them Catholics and the
other half Atheists.

But the Restoration came. The universities were again in loyal hands;
and there was reason to hope that there would be again a national church
fit for a gentleman. Wycherley became a member of Queen's College,
Oxford, and abjured the errors of the Church of Rome. The somewhat
equivocal glory of turning, for a short time, a good-for-nothing Papist
into a good-for-nothing Protestant is ascribed to Bishop Barlow.

Wycherley left Oxford without taking a degree, and entered at the
Temple, where he lived gayly for some years, observing the humors of the
town, enjoying its pleasures, and picking up just as much law as was
necessary to make the character of a pettifogging attorney or of a
litigious client entertaining in a comedy.

From an early age he had been in the habit of amusing himself by
writing. Some wretched lines of his on the Restoration are still extant.
Had he devoted himself to the making of verses, he would have been
nearly as far below Tate and Blackmore as Tate and Blackmore are below
Dryden. His only chance for renown would have been that he might have
occupied a niche in a satire, between Flecknoe and Settle. There was,
however, another kind of composition in which his talents and
acquirements qualified him to succeed; and to that he judiciously betook
himself.

In his old age he used to say that he wrote Love in a Wood at nineteen,
the Gentleman Dancing-Master at twenty-one, the Plain Dealer at
twenty-five, and the Country Wife at one or two and thirty. We are
incredulous, we own, as to the truth of this story. Nothing that we know
of Wycherley leads us to think him incapable of sacrificing truth to
vanity. And his memory in the decline of his life play