The fame of the young man was now made; but in the following year it was destined to shine out more brilliantly still.  Old Betterton—­one of the best Hamlets that ever trod the stage, and of whom Booth declared that when he was playing the Ghost to his Hamlet, his look of surprise and horror was so natural, that Booth could not for some minutes recover himself—­was now a veteran in his sixtieth year.  For forty years he had walked the boards, and made a fortune for the patentees of Drury.  It was very shabby of them, therefore, to give some of his best parts to younger actors.  Betterton was disgusted, and determined to set up for himself, to which end he managed to procure another patent, turned the Queen’s Court in Portugal Row, Lincoln’s Inn, into a theatre, and opened it on the 30th of April, 1695.  The building had been before used as a theatre in the days of the Merry Monarch, and Tom Killegrew had acted here some twenty years before; but it had again become a ’tennis-quatre of the lesser sort,’ says Cibber, and the new theatre was not very grand in fabric.  But Betterton drew to it all the best actors and actresses of his former company; and Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Bracegirdle remained true to the old man.  Congreve, to his honour, espoused the same cause, and the theatre opened with his play of ‘Love for Love,’ which was more successful than either of the former.  The veteran himself spoke the prologue, and fair Bracegirdle the epilogue, in which the poet thus alluded to their change of stage: 

    ’And thus our audience, which did once resort
     To shining theatres to see our sport,
     Now find us tost into a tennis-court. 
     Thus from the past, we hope for future grace: 
     I beg it——­
     And some here know I have a begging face.’

The king himself completed the success of the opening by attending it, and the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields might have ruined the older house, if it had not been for the rapidity with which Vanbrugh and Cibber, who wrote for Old Drury, managed to concoct their pieces; while Congreve was a slower, though perhaps better, writer.  ‘Love for Love’ was hereafter a favourite of Betterton’s, and when in 1709, a year before his death, the company gave the old man—­then in ill health, poor circumstances, and bad spirits—­a benefit, he chose this play, and himself, though more than seventy, acted the part of Valentine, supported by Mrs. Bracegirdle as Angelina, and Mrs. Barry as Frail.

The young dramatist with all his success, was not satisfied with his fame, and resolved to show the world that he had as much poetry as wit in him.  This he failed to do; and, like better writers, injured his own fame, by not being contented with what he had.  Congreve—­the wit, the dandy, the man about town—­took it into his head to write a tragedy.  In 1697 ‘The Mourning Bride’ was acted at the Tennis Court Theatre.  The author was wise enough to return to his former