"Theirs was the giant race before the flood."
Since the return of the Royal house, much art and ability had been exerted, but the old masters had been still unrivalled:--
"Our builders were with want of genius curst. The second temple was not like the first."
At length a writer had arisen who, just emerging from boyhood, had surpassed the authors of the Knight of the Burning Pestle and of the Silent Woman, and who had only one rival left to contend with:--
"Heaven, that but once was prodigal before, To Shakespeare gave as much, she could not give him more."
Some lines near the end of the poem are singularly graceful and touching, and sank deep into the heart of Congreve:--
"Already am I worn with cares and age, And just abandoning the ungrateful stage; But you, whom every Muse and Grace adorn, Whom I foresee to better fortune horn, Be kind to my remains; and, oh, defend Against your judgment your departed friend. Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue, But guard those laurels which descend to you."
The crowd, as usual, gradually came over to the opinion of the men of note; and the Double Dealer was before long quite as much admired, though perhaps never so much liked, as the Old Bachelor.
In 1695 appeared Love for Love, superior both in wit and in scenic effect to either of the preceding plays. It was performed at a new theatre which Betterton and some other actors, disgusted by the treatment which they had received in Drury-Lane, had just opened in a tennis-court near Lincoln's Inn. Scarcely any comedy within the memory of the oldest man had been equally successful. The actors were so elated that they gave Congreve a share in their theatre; and he promised in return to furnish them with a play every year, if his health would permit. Two years passed, however, before he produced the Mourning Bride, a play which, paltry as it is when compared, we do not say, with Lear or Macbeth, but with the best dramas of Massinger and Ford, stands very high among the tragedies of the age in which it was written. To find anything so good we must go twelve years back to Venice Preserved, or six years forward to the Fair Penitent. The noble passage which Johnson, both in writing and in conversation, extolled above any other in the English drama, had suffered greatly in the public estimation from the extravagance of his praise. Had he contented himself with saying that it was finer than anything in the tragedies of Dryden, Otway, Lee, Rowe, Southern, Hughes, and Addison, than anything, in short, that had been written for the stage since the days of Charles the First, he would not have been in the wrong.