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BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL NOTICES

OF

WYCHERLEY, CONGREVE, VANBRUG II,

AND FARQUHAR.

BY LEIGH HUNT.

IN

WYCHERLEY.

collecting materials for the following lives, an eye has been had to the discovery of such additional facts, however small or even collateral in their interest, as might result from a diligent perusal of the works of the authors, and a reference to the literature of their age; and, accordingly, some have been procured, which it is hoped will not be unwelcome to the lovers of genius and of books.

The same wish to render the volume as complete as lay in the power of those concerned in it, has led also to the selection of such passages from the miscellaneous writings of the authors, as the editor, in the indulgence of a habit of that kind, felt an impulse to mark with his pen. Critical notices have been added to the biographical; and, at the conclusion of the whole, a general estimate has been attempted of their comparative merits, together with some idea of the moral spirit in which they deserve to be read.

WILLIAM WYCHERLEY, the earliest of these chiefs of our Prose Drama, was eldest son of Daniel Wycherley, Esquire, a gentleman of some property at Clive, near Shrewsbury, afterwards one of the tellers of the Exchequer; and he was born in that village about the year 1640. His ancestors have been traced, as residents on the spot, as far back as the reign of Henry the Fourth; but we believe nothing has been known of the family since our Author's time. A correspondent of the "Gentleman's Magazine," who in the year 1796 took the drawing of their house, from an engraving of which our vignette has been copied, says it had been a handsome structure, but left in great measure to go to decay, and the remainder clumsily turned into a farm-house. The walnut-tree in the print was said to have been planted by Wycherley, but he could not vouch for the truth of the report.*

The future dramatist appears to have received the rudiments of education, either at home or il the neighbourhood; and instead of going to the university at the early period of life then customary, probably owing to its heterodox condition under Cromwell, was sent at the age of fifteen, or thereabouts, to the banks of the Charente in France, where he was introduced to the reigning circles of the Rambouillets and Montausiers, who converted him to the continental orthodoxy, or

* Gentleman's Magazine, vols. lxxxi., lxxxii.

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