[11] This anecdote is given by Leigh Hunt on the authority of Voltaire's Letters concerning the English Nation. But Leigh Hunt's memory appears to have played him false. The only allusion, in Voltaire's Letters, to the connection between Wycherley and the Duchess, is contained in the following words:—"Mr. Wycherley, who was a long Time known publickly to be happy in the good Graces of the most celebrated Mistress of King Charles the Second."—Ed.
[12] Wycherley accordingly journeyed into France, about the beginning of the winter of 1678, and returned, entirely restored, at the end of the following spring. The King received him with the utmost favour, and made choice of him as governor to his son. It was immediately after this that Wycherley went down to Tunbridge (in the summer of 1679), where he met the Countess of Drogheda, whom he soon afterwards married.—Ed.
[13] Mr. Leigh Hunt supposes that the battle at which Wycherley was present was that which the Duke of York gained over Opdam, in 1665. We believe that it was one of the battles between Rupert and De Ruyter, in 1673.
The point is of no importance; and there cannot be said to be much evidence either way. We offer, however, to Mr. Leigh Hunt's consideration three arguments—of no great weight certainly—yet such as ought, we think, to prevail in the absence of better. First, it is not very likely that a young Templar, quite unknown in the world—and Wycherley was such in 1665—should have quitted his chambers to go to sea. On the other hand, it would have been in the regular course of things that, when a courtier and an equerry, he should offer his services. Secondly, his verses appear to have been written after a drawn battle, like those of 1673, and not after a complete victory, like that of 1665. Thirdly, in the epilogue to The Gentleman Dancing-Master, written in 1673, he says that "all gentlemen must pack to sea;" an expression which makes it probable that he did not himself mean to stay behind. The epilogue to The Gentleman Dancing-Master was probably written about the end of 1671. See the Introduction to that play.—Ed.
[14] There are no grounds whatever for this surmise.—Ed.
[15] "He lost his memory (forty years before he died) by a fever, and would repeat the same thought, sometimes in the compass of ten lines, and did not dream of its being inserted but just before: when you pointed it out to him, he would say, 'Gads-so, so it is! I thank you very much: pray blot it out.'"—Pope, in Spence's Anecdotes.
Elsewhere Pope states that he was forty years of age when the illness occurred. It is possible that this illness may have been the fever before mentioned, from which he sought recovery by travel, in the winter of 1678; though Dennis certainly describes him as returning "entirely restored," both in body and mind.—Ed.
[16] This assertion is wholly without foundation.—Ed.
[17] I can find no authority for this observation. It may have been spoken in a moment of peevishness, but it is certainly very far from conveying Wycherley's real estimate of his friend's genius.—Ed.
[18] This "strange friendship" only terminated, as has been already shown, with Wycherley's death.—Ed.