One more of his contemporaries I propose to bring forward as a witness to our author's character. George Granville, Baron Lansdowne, to the ordinary qualifications of an accomplished gentleman added some pretensions, not altogether contemptible, to the rank of a minor poet. He was the author of a vast number of elegantly written verses (usually addressed to "Mira"), of a tragedy (Heroic Love) commended by Dryden, and of an amusing comedy (Once a Lover and always a Lover) of the school of Wycherley and Congreve. In the second volume of his collected works is to be found an epistle in which he remarks, with some minuteness, upon the character and disposition of his friend Wycherley.
This letter is not dated, but, from internal evidence, must have been written about the year 1705 or 1706. Lansdowne sets out with declaring that his partiality to Wycherley as a friend might render what he says of him suspected, "if his Merit was not so well and so publickly established as to set him above Flattery. To do him barely Justice," he continues, "is an Undertaking beyond my Skill." Further he writes: "As pointed and severe as he is in his Writings, in his Temper he has all the Softness of the tenderest Disposition; gentle and inoffensive to every Man in his particular Character; he only attacks Vice as a publick Enemy, compassionating the Wound he is under a Necessity to probe." Yet, "in my Friend every Syllable, every Thought is masculine;" and it was, questionless, from this particularity that he acquired the sobriquet (alluding, at the same time, to The Plain Dealer) of Manly Wycherley. Of our Plain Dealer as a poet Lansdowne candidly confesses—"It is certain he is no Master of Numbers; but a Diamond is not less a Diamond for not being polish'd." And then, addressing his correspondent: "Congreve," he writes, "is your familiar Acquaintance, you may judge of Wycherley by him: they have the same manly way of Thinking and Writing, the same Candour, Modesty, Humanity, and Integrity of Manners: It is impossible not to love them for their own Sakes, abstracted from the Merit of their Works." In conclusion Lansdowne invites his correspondent to his lodging, to meet Wycherley, as well as "a young Poet, newly inspired," whose "Name is Pope," who "is not above seventeen or eighteen years of age, and promises Miracles," and whom Wycherley and Walsh "have taken under their Wing."
The foregoing testimonies are, I venture to think, sufficiently explicit. Johnson, indeed, supposes Wycherley to have been "esteemed without virtue, and caressed without good-humour," but a statement so obviously self-contradictory deserves no consideration. One thing is clear: that Wycherley was both beloved and honoured by men whose temper and capacity give irrefragable authority to their judgment, and that judgment, based, as it was upon personal and intimate acquaintance, it were presumption to dispute.
The present text is that of the first editions, which I have carefully collated with, and occasionally corrected by, the text of the edition of 1713 (the last published during the author's life), and that of Leigh Hunt's edition of 1849. I have usually followed the punctuation of Leigh Hunt, who was the first to punctuate the plays accurately.
Wm. C. Ward.
[WILLIAM WYCHERLEY.][7]
William Wycherley was born in 1640. He was the son of a Shropshire gentleman of old family,[8] and of what was then accounted a good estate. The property was estimated at £600 a year, a fortune which, among the fortunes at that time, probably ranked as a fortune of £2,000 a year would rank in our days.
William was an infant when the civil war broke out; and, while he was still in his rudiments, a Presbyterian hierarchy and a republican government were established on the ruins of the ancient church and throne. Old Mr. Wycherley was attached to the royal cause, and was not disposed to intrust the education of his heir to the solemn Puritans who now ruled the universities and the public schools. Accordingly, the young gentleman was sent at fifteen to France. He resided some time in the neighbourhood of the Duke of Montausier, chief of one of the noblest families of Touraine. The Duke's wife, a daughter of the house of Rambouillet, was a finished specimen of those talents and accomplishments for which her house 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 this 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 amongst 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.