The Restoration dramatists, who were dominated by French influence, so often sneered at morality and the virtues of the home, that they have paid the penalty of being little read in after times.  The theater has not yet entirely recovered from the deep-seated prejudice which was so intensified by the coarse plays which flourished for fifty years after the Restoration.

Although John Dryden is best known among a large number of Restoration dramatists,[2] he did better work in another field.  William Congreve (1670-1729) made the mast distinctive contribution to the new comedy of manners.  Descended from an old landowning family in Staffordshire, he was for a while a mate of Jonathan Swift at Trinity College, Dublin.  In 1691 Congreve was entered in the Middle Temple, London, to begin the study of law, but he soon turned playwright.  His four comedies,—­The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer, Love for Love, The Way of the World,—­and one tragedy, The Mourning Bride, were all written in the last decade of the seventeenth century.  After 1700 he wrote no more plays, although he lived nearly thirty years longer.  On his death, in 1729, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Congreve attempts to picture the manners of contemporary society, and he does not penetrate far below the surface of life.  He is not read for the depth of his thought, but for his humor and for the clear, pointed style of his prose comedies.  George Meredith says:—­

“Where Congreve excels all his English rivals is in his literary force, and a succinctness of style peculiar to him...  He is at once precise and voluble.  If you have ever thought upon style, you will acknowledge it to be a signal accomplishment.  In this he is a classic, and he is worthy of treading a measure with Moliere.”

Congreve’s best comedies are Love for Love and The Way of the World.  The majority of critics agree with Meredith in calling Miss Millimant, who is the heroine of the latter play, “an admirable, almost a lovable heroine.”  Meredith illustrates one phase of his own idea of the comic spirit, by the language which Miss Millimant uses in accepting her lover:  “If I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife.”  Congreve’s peculiar genius is well shown in his ability to make her manner of speech reveal her characteristics.  His plays are unfortunately disfigured with the coarseness of the age.

The blemishes in the drama did not exist, however, without an emphatic contemporary protest.  Jeremy Collier (1650-1729), a non-conforming bishop, in his Short View of the Immorality of the Stage (1698), complains that the unworthy hero of one of Congreve’s plays “is crowned for the man of merit, has his wishes thrown into his lap, and makes the happy exit.”

Such attacks had their weight and prepared the way far the more moral sentimental comedies of Richard Steele and succeeding playwrights.  The sacrifice of plot to moral purpose and the deliberate introduction of scenes designed to force an appeal to sentiment caused the later drama to deteriorate in a different way.  We shall see that the natural hearty humor of Goldsmith’s comedy, She Stoops to Conquer(1773), afforded a welcome relief from such plays.