ycherley his aged father died, and he was put in possession of the family estate. His circumstances were now made easier, but he seems never to have been free from incumbrances. His estate was strictly entailed, so that he could not borrow largely on it, and he was at variance with the heir-at-law, his nephew. He appears to have lived mostly in town, frequenting theatres and coffeehouses—a veteran rake, and decayed wit. Dryden wished him to join in writing a comedy, but he declined the honour in an encomiastic copy of verses. The great poet in turn spoke of

"The satire, wit, and strength of Manly Wycherley."

Rochester termed him "Slow Wycherley," and other contemporaries represent him as careful in composition. He had apparently exhausted his powers of invention before he had completed half of his term of existence. Lely had painted his portrait in his twenty-eighth year; and now in his sixty-third he had it engraved, affixing to the engraving the Virgilian motto, Quantum mutatus ab illo (how changed from him!)—words which Pope says he used to repeat with melancholy emphasis.

Thus fares it still in our decay, And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what age takes away Than what it leaves behind."

So says Wordsworth, but Wycherley had not the "wiser mind." The literary ambition of the dramatist still remained, and in 1704 he published a folio volume of Miscellaneous Poems, remarkable only for bad rhymes and profligate sentiments. About the same time he made the acquaintance of Pope, then a youth of sixteen, immersed amidst his solitary studies in Windsor Forest, but longing eagerly for personal and literary distinction. Pope courted the society of Wycherley, running after him in town, he says, like a dog, and trying, but in vain, to get him to visit the young poet's "paternal cell" at Binfield. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu attributed this to a sordid motive—to Pope's anxiety to secure a legacy, but it seems to have been prompted solely by his passion for literature and his desire to escape from rustic obscurity. A correspondence was opened between the dramatist of sixty-four and the pastoral poet of sixteen, in which, reversing the order of nature, the youth appears as preceptor and critic. The manner in which Pope "cooked" his letters for publication renders it difficult to tell what is genuine and what fabricated, but Wycherley appears to have asked the young student to correct his verses, and Pope set about the task vigorously. Some passages he lopped off, "as we take branches from a tree to add to the fruit;" and others he "entirely new expressed and turned more into poetry."

Let them undergo your purgatory!" exclaimed the mortified senior, but at the same time hoping that his critic's "great mind" might not destroy his "little, tender, and crazy carcass." The result might have been foreseen: mutual dissatisfaction and aversion ensued; Pope returned the manuscripts, and the intercourse between the parties was broken up. It was afterwards partially renewed, Pope seeming to repent of his critical honesty, but there never was any cordiality between them. The correspondence closed in 1710. Wycherley lived five years afterwards, and when he saw that death was at hand he resolved to marry, in order to burden and injure the heir-at-law, his nephew! "Some hundred pounds which he had with the Wycherley lady," says Pope, "discharged his debts. A jointure of four hundred a-year made her a recompense; and the nephew he left to comfort himself as well as he could with the miserable remains of a mortgaged estate." He survived his marriage eleven days, and the evening before he expired he called his young wife to his bedside, and entreated her not to deny him one request. "My dear," he said, "it is only this, that you will never marry an old man again"—a truly dramatic and characteristic close to his dramatic life! The woman married a Captain Shrimpton, who sold Wycherley's papers, and from these a volume of Posthumous Works was published in 1728, edited by Theobald, the original hero of the Dunciad. The manuscripts were much interlined, and scarce legible, thus supporting the sobriquet of "Slow Wycherley," and in point of literary merit, or rather demerit, they fully justified Pope's depreciatory and contemptuous criticism. A few of the prose maxims are tersely expressed, and evince the observation of the man of the world, but the verses, which form the bulk of the volume, are utterly despicable. More of Wycherley's papers Theobald said remained behind, waiting publication if readers demanded further remains of the deceased wit, but no more was heard of them. Wycherley had outlived his fame. In his own walk of the drama Congreve had eclipsed him; the essays of Addison and Steele, and the masculine satire of Swift, had introduced a purer taste and higher standard of literary excellence, and in poetry Pope reigned supreme. Wycherley died in December 1715, and was buried in the vault of Covent Garden Church (St Paul's), where are also the remains of his contemporaries Butler and Lely.

As a dramatist, Wycherley is now known only to critics and literary students. The general reader and playgoer have long since lost sight of him. No manager would venture to reproduce any one of his comedies on the stage, and even his style of dialogue, once so popular, appears forced and unnatural to the present generation. It is often pointed and witty, and it served as a model for Congreve and Farquhar, who in turn were the dramatic fathers of Sheridan and Colman; but all of these improved upon the original. They had equal or more wit, with greater variety and brilliancy. Their jests and epigrams are less laboured in appearance; they have fewer oaths and expletives; and if they are not more moral in tendency they are at least greatly more decent in discourse. Wycherley has only one character that has any pretensions to originality—the litigious and bustling Widow Blackacre. His Manly, the Plain Dealer, is an Anglicised copy of Molière's Misanthrope; and his Gentleman Dancing Master is borrowed in part from the "Ecole des Femmes." Indeed, most of his plots, intrigues, and contretemps are taken from the Spanish or French drama. And whatever Wycherley borrowed he debased. His taste was radically coarse and depraved, and his standard of morality never rose above that of Whitehall under Charles the Second. Of that period his plays afford a good illustration. We may also discover in them here and there a clever epigrammatic sentence or a lively comic illustration, but no one ever found in them a scene that touched his heart or elevated his imagination.

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1 Moore has noticed a sentiment of Wycherley's ("Plain Dealer," act i. sc. 1, not the Country Wife, as by a slip of the pen Moore writes), which he thinks Baras may have copied. "Counterfeit honour," says Manly, "will not be current with me; I weigh the man, not his title; 'tis not the king's stamp can make the metal better or heavier." Baras has

"The rank is but the guinea's stamp,

The man's the gowd for a' that."

In the same scene Manly makes a just and an acute observation. "Speaking well of all mankind is the worst kind of detraction, for it takes away the reputation of the few good men in the world, by making all alike." And in a subsequent act, "He that distrusts most the world, trusts most to himself, and is but the more easily deceived, because he thinks he can't be deceived. His cunning is like the coward's sword, by which he is oftener worsted than defended." Sentiments of this kind are scattered through Wycherley's dialogues, but his knowledge was more of evil than of good.