The luster of William Congreve's achievement as the greatest comic dramatist of the English Restoration has tended to obscure the other facets of his varied literary career as poet, critic, translator, correspondent, and novelist. Significantly, he first appeared in print not as a playwright but as the anonymous author of the novella Incognita; or, Love and Duty Reconcil'd (1692). Just as his brilliance brought the Restoration comic stage to its fullest flower, so in this witty prose narrative the influential Continental "novella" tradition in the manner "of Scarron"--short, realistic tales told by an intrusive narrator--finds its most urbane English expression. Though reprinted at least four times between 1699 and 1743, Congreve's delightful tale is today remembered chiefly for its preface, praised by Dr. Johnson as "uncommonly judicious," in which his crucial distinction between novel and romance anticipates the direction of eighteenth-century critical debate on the novel and its literary merits...