Life And Writings Of William Congreve PDF Download

From prefatory note: THE very remarkable revival of public interest in the plays of Congreve, exhibited on the stage during the past two or three years, has encouraged me to revise and enlarge the memoir which I published in r888. That biography, the first ever attempted, has not, I believe, been superseded by any later work, although it has long been out of print. A certain amount of new material has in the course of nearly forty years turned up, and this has beenincorporated in the ensuing pages. But unless fresh sources should most unexpectedly be discovered, the opportunity for preparing a full and picturesque life of this poet has wholly passed away. The task should have been undertaken two hundred years ago, when those were still alive who knew him personally. This occasion was unaccountably allowed to slip by, partly, no doubt, because the modern art of biography was but very poorly understood, but partly, also, because Congreve was no very fascinatingor absorbing human being. Correct biographies of Pope or Swift were not published until long after the decease of those writers, yet we have no difficulty whatever in restoring them to life in fancy. But then they possessed an interesting personal quality, of which the author of TheWay of the World seems to have been devoi