SOURCE: Cibber, Theophilus. “Sir George Etherege.” In The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 3, pp. 33-9. 1753. Reprint. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968.

In the essay below, Cibber appraises Etherege's life and works, maintaining that the poet “possessed a springly genius,” but that “his works are so extremely loose and licentious, as to render them dangerous to young, unguarded minds.”

A celebrated wit in the reign of Charles and James II. He is said to have been descended of an ancient family of Oxfordshire, and born about the year 1636; it is thought he had some part of his education at the university of Cambridge, but in his younger years he travelled into France, and consequently made no long stay at the university. Upon his return, he, for some time, studied the Municipal Law at one of the Inns of Court, in which, it seems, he made...