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.

Wycherley was born in 1640, and died in 1715.
CONGREVE .-- William Congreve, who is of the same school of morals, is far superior as a writer; indeed, were one name to be selected in illustration of our subject, it would be his.

He was born in 1666, and, after being educated at Trinity College, Dublin, was a student at the Middle Temple.
His first play, _The Old Bachelor_, produced in his twenty-first year, was a great success, and won for him the patronage of Lord Halifax.