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But Dryden, as a playwright, does not enjoy the infamous honor of a high
rank among his fellow-dramatists. The proper representations of the drama
in that age were, in Comedy, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar;
and, in Tragedy, Otway, Rowe, and Lee.

WYCHERLEY.--Of the comedists of this period, where all were evil, William
Wycherley was the worst. In his four plays, _Love in a Wood_, _The
Gentleman Dancing-Master_, _The Country Wife_, and _The Plain Dealer_, he
outrages all decency, ridicules honesty and virtue, and makes vice always
triumphant. As a young man, profligate with pen and in his life, he was a
wicked old man; for, when sixty-four years of age, he published a
miscellany of verses of which Macaulay says: "The style and versification
are beneath criticism: the morals are those of Rochester." And yet it is
sad to be obliged to say that his characters pleased the age, because such
men and women really lived then, and acted just as he describes them. He
depicted vice to applaud and not to punish it.


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