William Congreve

William Congreve wrote four comedies and a tragedy before he was thirty and then, wounded by Jeremy Collier’s attack on the immorality of the stage, wrote no more plays for the remaining twenty-nine years of his life, living on sinecures and the friendship of Swift, Pope and the Duchess of Marlborough. The Way of the World of 1700, the last and best of the Restoration comedies, failed in its own day and is now the one always revived; its proviso scene, in which Mirabell and Millamant negotiate the terms of their marriage, is the wittiest dialogue in English. Voltaire visited him and was annoyed that he wished to be thought a gentleman rather than a writer.