rank, and lavish compliments upon him. Voltaire went to wait upon him as on one of the Representatives of Literature-and the man who scarce praises any other living person, who flung abuse at Pope, and Swift, and Steele, and Addison, the Grub-street Timon, old John Dennis,' was hat in hand to Mr. Congreve; and said, that when he retired from the stage, Comedy went with him.

Nor was he less victorious elsewhere. He was admired in the drawing-rooms as well as the coffee-houses; as much beloved in the side-box as on the stage. He loved, and conquered, and jilted the beautiful Bracegirdle,' the heroine of all his plays, the favourite of all the town of her dayand the Duchess of Marlborough, Marlborough's daughter, had such an admiration of him, that when he died she had an ivory figure made to imitate him,' and a large wax doll with gouty feet to be dressed just as the great Congreve's gouty feet were dressed in his great lifetime. He saved some money by his Pipe-office, and his Custom-house office, and his Hackney-coach office, and nobly left it, not to Bracegreve and of—A. POPE." Postscript to Translation of the Iliad of Homer. March 25, 1720.

1 "When asked why he listened to the praises of Dennis, he said, he had much rather be flattered than abused. Swift had a particular friendship for our author, and generally took him under his protection in his high authoritative manner."— THOS. DAVIES. Dramatic Miscellanies.

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Congreve was very intimate for years with Mrs. Bracegirdle, and lived in the same street, his house very near hers, until his acquaintance with the young Duchess of Marlborough. He then quitted that house. The Duchess showed us a diamond necklace (which Lady Di. used afterwards to wear) that cost seven thousand pounds, and was purchased with the money Congreve left her. How much better would it have been to have given it to poor Mrs. Bracegirdle."-Dr. YOUNG, Spence's Anec dotes.

"A glass was put in the hand of the statue, which was supposed to bow to he! Grace and to nod in approbation of what she spoke to it."-THOS. DAVIES. Dra matic Miscellanies.

girdle, who wanted it,' but to the Duchess of Marlborough, who did not.

How can I introduce to you that merry and shameless Comic Muse who won him such a reputation? Nell Gwynn's servant fought the other footmen for having called his mistress bad names; and in like manner, and with pretty like epithets, Jeremy Collier attacked that godless, reckless Jezebel, the English comedy of his time, and called her what Nell Gwynn's man's fellow-servants called Nell Gwynn's man's mistress-the servants of the theatre, Dryden, Congreve,' and others, defended themselves with the

The sum Congreve left her was 2001., as is said in the "Dramatic Miscellanies" of Tom Davies; where are some particulars about this charming actress and beautiful woman.

She had a "lively aspect," says Tom, on the authority of Cibber, and “such a glow of health and cheerfulness in her countenance, as inspired everybody with desire." "Scarce an audience saw her that were not half of them her lovers."

Congreve and Rowe courted her in the persons of their lovers. "In Tamerlane, Rowe courted her Selima, in the person of Axalla . . . . .; Congreve insinuated his addresses in his Valentine to her Angelica, in his 'Love for Love ;' in his Osmyn to her Almena, in the 'Mourning Bride;' and, lastly, in his Mirabel to her Millamant, in the 'Way of the World.' Mirabel, the fine gentleman of the play, is, I believe, not very distant from the real character of Congreve."-Dramatic Miscella nies, vol. iii. 1784.

She retired from the stage when Mrs. Oldfield began to be the public favourite She died in 1748, in the eighty-fifth year of her age.

* Johnson calls his legacy the "accumulation of attentive parsimony, which," he continues, "though to her (the Duchess) superfluous and useless, might have given great assistance to the ancient family from which he descended, at that time, by the imprudence of his relation, reduced to difficulties and distress."-Lives of the Poets.

He replied to Collier, in the pamphlet called "Amendments of Mr. Collier's False and Imperfect Citations," &c. A specimen or two are subjoined :"The greater part of these examples which he has produced, are only demonstrations of his own impurity: they only savour of his utterance, and were sweet enough till tainted by his breath.

"Where the expression is unblameable in its own pure and genuine signification, he enters into it, himself, like the evil spirit; he possesses the innocent phrase, and makes it bellow forth his own blasphemies.

same success, and for the same cause which set Nell's lackey fighting. She was a disreputable, daring, laughing, painted French baggage, that Comic Muse. She came over from the continent with Charles (who chose many more of his female friends there) at the Restoration-a wild, dishevelled Laïs, with eyes bright with wit and wine-a saucy courtfavourite that sate at the King's knees, and laughed in his face, and when she showed her bold cheeks at her chariotwindow, had some of the noblest and most famous people of the land bowing round her wheel. She was kind and popular enough, that daring Comedy, that audacious poor Nell-she was gay and generous, kind, frank, as such people can afford to be: and the men who lived with her and laughed with her, took her pay and drank her wine, turned out when the Puritans hooted her, to fight and defend her. But the jade was indefensible, and it is pretty certain her servants knew it.

There is life and death going on in every thing: truth and lies are always at battle. Pleasure is always warring against self-restraint. Doubt is always crying Psha, and sneering. A man in life, a humourist in writing about life, sways over to one principle or the other, and laughs with the reverence for right and the love of truth in his heart, or laughs at these from the other side. Didn't I tell you that

"If I do not return him civilities in calling him names, it is because I am not very well versed in his nomenclatures. . . . . . . I will only call him Mr. Collier, and that I will call him as often as I think he shall deserve it.

"The corruption of a rotten divine is the generation of a sour critic." "Congreve," says Dr. Johnson, "a very young man, elated with success, and impatient of censure, assumed an air of confiderce and security. . . . . . The dispute was protracted through two years; but at last Comedy grew more modest, and Collier lived to see the reward of his labours in the reformation of the theatre."-Life of Congreve.

dancing was a serious business to Harlequin? I have read two or three of Congreve's plays over before speaking of him; and my feelings were rather like those, which I daresay most of us here have had, at Pompeii, looking at Sallust's house and the relics of an orgy, a dried wine-jar or two, a charred supper-table, the breast of a dancing girl pressed against the ashes, the laughing skull of a jester, a perfect stillness round about, as the Cicerone twangs his moral, and the blue sky shines calmly over the ruin. The Congreve muse is dead, and her song choked in Time's ashes. We gaze at the skeleton, and wonder at the life which once revelled in its mad veins. We take the skull up, and muse over the frolic and daring, the wit, scorn, passion, hope, desire, with which that empty bowl once fermented. We think of the glances that allured, the tears that melted, of the bright eyes that shone in those vacant sockets; and of lips whispering love, and cheeks dimpling with smiles, that once covered yon ghastly yellow frame-work. They used to call those teeth pearls once. See! there's the cup she drank from, the gold-chain she wore on her neck, the vaso which held the rouge for her cheeks, her looking-glass, and the harp she used to dance to. Instead of a feast we find a grave-stone, and in place of a mistress, a few bones!

Reading in these plays now, is like shutting your ears and looking at people dancing. What does it mean? the measures, the grimaces, the bowing, shuffling and retreating, the cavalier soul advancing upon those ladies-those ladies and men twirling round at the end in a mad galop, after which everybody bows and the quaint rite is celebrated. Without the music we cannot understand that comic dance of the last century-its strange gravity and gaiety,

its decorum or its indecorum. It has a jargon of its own quite unlike life; a sort of moral of its own quite unlike life too. I'm afraid it's a Heathen mystery, symbolising a Pagan doctrine; protesting, as the Pompeians very likely were, assembled at their theatre and laughing at their games as Sallust and his friends, and their mistresses protested-crowned with flowers, with cups in their hands, against the new, hard, ascetic pleasure-hating doctrine, whose gaunt disciples, lately passed over from the Asian shores of the Mediterranean were for breaking the fair images of Venus, and flinging the altars of Bacchus down.

I fancy poor Congreve's theatre is a temple of Pagan delights, and mysteries not permitted except among heathens. I fear the theatre carries down that ancient tradition and worship, as masons have carried their secret signs and rites from temple to temple. When the libertine hero carries off the beauty in the play, and the dotard is laughed to scorn for having the young wife: in the ballad, when the poet bid his mistress to gather roses while she may, and warns her that old Time is still a-flying: in the ballet, when honest Corydon courts Phillis under the treillage of the pasteboard cottage, and leers at her over the head of grandpapa in red stockings, who is opportunely asleep; and when seduced by the invitations of the rosy youth she comes forward to the footlights, and they perform on each other's tiptoes that pas which you all know and which is only interrupted by old grandpapa awaking from his doze at the pasteboard chalet (whither he returns to take another nap in case the young people get an encore): when Harlequin, splendid in youth, strength and agility, arrayed in gold and a thousand colours, springs over the heads of countless perils, leaps down the