The same chronicler says:  The Maiden Queene was “mightily commended for the regularity of it, and the strain and wit;” but of the Ladys a la Mode he says it was “so mean a thing” that, when it was announced for the next night, the pit “fell a laughing, because the house was not a quarter full.”

But Dryden, as a playwright, does not enjoy the infamous honor of a high rank among his fellow-dramatists.  The proper representations of the drama in that age were, in Comedy, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar; and, in Tragedy, Otway, Rowe, and Lee.

WYCHERLEY.—­Of the comedists of this period, where all were evil, William Wycherley was the worst.  In his four plays, Love in a Wood, The Gentleman Dancing-Master, The Country Wife, and The Plain Dealer, he outrages all decency, ridicules honesty and virtue, and makes vice always triumphant.  As a young man, profligate with pen and in his life, he was a wicked old man; for, when sixty-four years of age, he published a miscellany of verses of which Macaulay says:  “The style and versification are beneath criticism:  the morals are those of Rochester.”  And yet it is sad to be obliged to say that his characters pleased the age, because such men and women really lived then, and acted just as he describes them.  He depicted vice to applaud and not to punish it.  Wycherley was born in 1640, and died in 1715.

CONGREVE.—­William Congreve, who is of the same school of morals, is far superior as a writer; indeed, were one name to be selected in illustration of our subject, it would be his.  He was born in 1666, and, after being educated at Trinity College, Dublin, was a student at the Middle Temple.  His first play, The Old Bachelor, produced in his twenty-first year, was a great success, and won for him the patronage of Lord Halifax.  His next, The Double Dealer, caused Dryden to proclaim him the equal of Shakspeare!  Perhaps his most famous comedy is Love for Love, which is besides an excellent index to the morality of the age.  The author was quoted and caressed; Pope dedicated to him his Translation of the Iliad; and Voltaire considered him the most successful English writer of comedy.  His merit consists in some degree of originality, and in the liveliness of his colloquies.  His wit is brilliant and flashing, but, in the words of Thackeray, the world to him “seems to have had no moral at all.”

How much he owed to the French school, and especially to Moliere, may be judged from the fact that a whole scene in Love for Love is borrowed from the Don Juan of Moliere.  It is that in which Trapland comes to collect his debt from Valentine Legend.  Readers of Moliere will recall the scene between Don Juan, Sganarelle and M. Dimanche, which is here, with change of names, taken almost word for word.  His men are gallants neither from love or passion, but from the custom of the age, of which it is said, “it would break Mr. Tattle’s heart to think anybody else should be beforehand with him;” and Mr. Tattle was the type of a thousand fine gentlemen in the best English society of that day.