In comparing the work of William Wycherley, William Congreve, John Vanbrugh, and George Farquhar, Leigh Hunt concluded that, of the four, "Farquhar had the highest animal spirits, with fits of the deepest sympathy, the greatest wish to please rather than to strike, the most agreeable diversity of character, the best instinct in avoiding revolting extravagances of the time, and the happiest invention in plot and situation; and, therefore, is to be pronounced, upon the whole, the truest dramatic genius, and the most likely to be of lasting popularity." Indeed Farquhar was the most popular and perhaps the best playwright producing plays for the London stage at the turn of the eighteenth century. He was certainly the most original; in an era in which authors borrowed from earlier English drama or translated plots or scenes from Greek, Latin, French, or Spanish models (as they mixed several sources together in...