ive him more."

Some lines near the end of the poem are singularly graceful and
touching, and sank deep into the heart of Congreve:--

"Already am I worn with cares and age,
And just abandoning the ungrateful stage;
But you, whom every Muse and Grace adorn,
Whom I foresee to better fortune horn,
Be kind to my remains; and, oh, defend
Against your judgment your departed friend.
Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue,
But guard those laurels which descend to you."

The crowd, as usual, gradually came over to the opinion of the men of
note; and the Double Dealer was before long quite as much admired,
though perhaps never so much liked, as the Old Bachelor.

In 1695 appeared Love for Love, superior both in wit and in scenic
effect to either of the preceding plays. It was performed at a new
theatre which Betterton and some other actors, disgusted by the
treatment which they had received in Drury-Lane, had just opened in a
tennis-court near Lincoln's Inn. Scarcely any comedy within the memory
of the oldest man had been equally successful. The actors were so elated
that they gave Congreve a share in their theatre; and he promised in
return to furnish them with a play every year, if his health would
permit. Two years passed, however, before he produced the Mourning
Bride, a play which, paltry as it is when compared, we do not say, with
Lear or Macbeth, but with the best dramas of Massinger and Ford, stands
very high among the tragedies of the age in which it was written. To
find anything so good we must go twelve years back to Venice Preserved,
or six years forward to the Fair Penitent. The noble passage which
Johnson, both in writing and in conversation, extolled above any other
in the English drama, had suffered greatly in the public estimation from
the extravagance of his praise. Had he contented himself with saying
that it was finer than anything in the tragedies of Dryden, Otway, Lee,
Rowe, Southern, Hughes, and Addison, than anything, in short, that had
been written for the stage since the days of Charles the First, he would
not have been in the wrong.

The success of the Mourning Bride was even greater than that of Love for
Love. Congreve was now allowed to be the first tragic as well as the
first comic dramatist of his time; and all this at twenty-seven. We
believe that no English writer except Lord Byron has, at so early an
age, stood so high in the estimation of his contemporar