[In the following essay, Gosse considers Etherege a principal founder of modern English comedy, particularly focusing on Molière's influence on the dramatist. The critic also provides an intimate glimpse of the author's later years through an examination of his personal and official correspondence in a recently discovered Letterbook.]

That Sir George Etheredge wrote three plays which are now even less read than the rank and file of Restoration drama, and that he died at Ratisbon, at an uncertain date, by falling down the stairs of his own house and breaking his neck after a banquet, these are the only particulars which can be said to be known, even to students of literature, concerning the career of a very remarkable writer. I shall endeavour to show in the following pages that the entire neglect of the three plays is an unworthy return for the singular part they enjoyed in the creation of modern English comedy; and I shall be able to prove that the one current anecdote of Etheredge's life has no foundation in fact whatever. At the same time I shall have the satisfaction of printing, mainly for the first time, and from MS. sources, a mass of biographical material which makes this dramatist, hitherto the shadowiest figure of his time, perhaps the one poet of the Restoration of whose life and character we know the most. The information I refer to has been culled from two or three fields. Firstly, from the incidental references to the author scattered in the less-known writings of his contemporaries; secondly, from an article published in 1750, and from MS. notes still unprinted, both from the pen of that “busy, curious, thirsty fly” of polite letters, the antiquarian Oldys; but mostly, and with far the greatest confidence, from a volume in the Manuscript Room of the British Museum, entitled The Letterbook of Sir George Etheredge, while he was Envoy Extraordinary at Ratisbon. This volume, which is in the handwriting of an un-named secretary, contains drafts of over one hundred letters from Etheredge, in English and French, a certain number of letters addressed to him by famous persons, some of his accounts, a hudibrastic poem on his character, and, finally, some extremely caustic letters, treacherously written by the secretary, to bring his master into bad odour in England. I cannot understand how so very curious and important a miscellany has hitherto been overlooked. It was bought by the British Museum in 1837, and, as far as I can find out, has been never referred to, or made use of in any way. It abounds with historical and literary allusions of great interest, and, as far as Etheredge is concerned, is simply a mine of wealth. Having premised so much, I will endeavour to put together, as concisely as possible, what I have been able to collect from all these sources.

On January 9, 1686, Etheredge addressed to the Earl of Middleton an epistle in octosyllabics, which eventually, in 1704, was printed in his Works. Readers of Dryden will recollect that a letter in verse to Sir George Etheredge by that poet has always been included in Dryden's poems, and that it begins:—

To you who live in chill degree,
As map informs, of fifty-three,
And do not much for cold atone
By bringing thither fifty-one.

That Etheredge was fifty-one at the date of this epistle has hitherto been of little service to us, since we could not tell when that letter was composed. The Letterbook, however, in giving us the date of Etheredge's epistle, to which Dryden's poem was an immediate answer, supplies us with an important item. If Etheredge was fifty-one in the early spring of 1686, he must have been born in 1634 or the first months of 1635. He was, therefore, a contemporary of Dryden, Roscommon, and Dorset, rather than, as has always been taken for granted, of the younger generation of Wycherley, Shadwell, and Rochester. Nothing is known of his family. Gildon, who knew him, reported that he belonged to an old Oxfordshire family, and, therefore, may probably have been a descendant of Dr. George Etheredge, the famous Greek and Hebrew scholar, who died about 1590, and whose family estate was at Thame. Oldys very vaguely conjectures that our dramatist was educated at Cambridge. Gildon states that for a little while he studied the law, but adds, what external and internal evidence combine to prove, that he spent much of his early manhood in France. My own impression is that from about 1658 to 1663 he was principally in Paris. His French, in prose and verse, is as fluent as his English; and his plays are full of allusions that show him to be intimately at home in Parisian matters. What in the other Restoration playwrights seems a Gallic affectation seems nature in him. My reason for supposing that he did not arrive in London at the Restoration, but a year or two later, is that he appears to have been absolutely unknown in London until his Comical Revenge was acted; and also because he shows in that play an acquaintance with the new school of French comedy. He seems to have possessed means of his own, and to have lived a thoroughly idle life, without aim or ambition, until, in 1664, it occurred to him, in his thirtieth year, to write a play.

At any critical moment in the development of a literature, events follow one another with such headlong speed, that I must be forgiven if I am a little tiresome about the sequence of dates. According to all the bibliographers, old and new, Etheredge's first play was She Would if She Could, 1668, immediately followed by The Comical Revenge, first printed in 1669. If this were the case, the claim of Etheredge to critical attention would be comparatively small. Oldys, however, mentions that he had heard of, but never seen, an edition of this latter play of 1664. Neither Langbaine, Gildon, or any of their successors believe in the existence of such a quarto, nor is a copy to be found in the British Museum. However, I have been so fortunate as to pick up two copies of this mythical quarto of 1664, the main issue of which I suppose to have been destroyed by some one of the many accidents that befell London in that decade, and Etheredge's precedence of all his more eminent comic contemporaries is thus secured. The importance of this date, 1664, is rendered still more evident when we consider that it constitutes a claim for its author for originality in two distinct kinds. The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub, which was acted at the Duke of York's Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, in the summer of 1664, is a tragicomedy, of which the serious portions are entirely written in rhymed heroics, and the comic portions in prose. The whole question of the use of rhyme in English drama has been persistently misunderstood, and its history misstated. In Mr. George Saintsbury's new life of Dryden, for the first time, the subject receives due critical attention, and is approached with the necessary equipment. But while I thoroughly agree with Mr. Saintsbury's view of the practice, I think something may be added from the purely historical side. The fashion of rhyme in the drama, then, to be exact, flourished from 1664 until Lee and Dryden returned to blank verse in 1678. Upon this it suddenly languished, and after being occasionally used until the end of the century, found its last example in Sedley's Beauty the Conqueror, published in 1702. The customary opinion that both rhymed dramatic verse and the lighter form of comedy were introduced simultaneously with the Restoration is one of those generalisations which are easily made and slavishly repeated, but which fall before the slightest historical investigation. When the drama was reorganised in 1660, it reappeared in the old debased forms, without the least attempt at novelty. Brome and Shirley had continued to print their plays during the Commonwealth, and in Jasper Mayne had found a disciple who united, without developing, their merits or demerits. During the first years of the Restoration the principal playwrights were Porter, a sort of third-rate Brome, Killegrew, an imitator of Shirley, Stapylton, an apparently lunatic person, and Sir William Lower, to whom is due the praise of having studied French contemporary literature with great zeal, and of having translated Corneille and Quinault. Wherever these poetasters ventured into verse, they displayed such an incompetence as has never before or since disgraced any coterie of considerable writers. Their blank verse was simply inorganic, their serious dialogue a sort of insanity, their comedy a string of pothouse buffooneries and preposterous “humours.” Dryden, in his Wild Gallant, and a very clever dramatist, Wilson, who never fulfilled his extraordinary promise, tried in 1663 to revive the moribund body of comedy, but always in the style of Ben Jonson; and finally, in 1664, came the introduction of rhymed dramatic verse. For my own part, I frankly confess that I think it was the only course that it was possible to take. The blank iambics of the romantic dramatists had become so execrably weak and distended, the whole movement of dramatic verse had grown so flaccid, that a little restraint in the severe limits of rhyme was absolutely necessary. It has been too rashly taken for granted that we owe the introduction of the new form to Dryden. It is true that in the 1664 preface to The Rival Ladies, a play produced on the boards in the winter of 1663, Dryden recommends the use of rhyme in heroic plays, and this fact, combined with the little study given to Dryden's dramas, has led the critics to take for granted that that play is written in rhyme. A glance at the text will show that this is a mistake. The Rival Ladies is written in blank verse, and only two short passages of dialogue in the third act exhibit the timid way in which Dryden tested the ear of the public. Of course lyrical passages in all plays, and the main part of masques, such as the pastorals of Day, had, even in the Elizabethan age, been written in decasyllabic rhymed verse; but these exceptions are as little to the point as is the example which Dryden shelters himself under, The Siege of Rhodes. This piece was an opera, and therefore naturally in rhyme. As a point of fact Dryden was the first to propose, and Etheredge the first to carry out, the experiment of writing ordinary plays in rhyme. Encouraged by the preface to The Rival Ladies, and urged on by the alexandrines he was accustomed to listen to on the French stage, Etheredge put the whole serious part of his Comical Revenge into dialogue of which this piece from the duel scene is an example:—

BRUCE.
Brave men! this action makes it well appear
'Tis honour and not envy brings you here.
BEAUFORT.
We come to conquer, Bruce, and not to see
Such villains rob us of our victory;
Your lives our fatal swords claim as their due,
We'ed wronged ourselves had we not righted you.
BRUCE.
Your generous courage has obliged us so,
That to your succour we our safety owe.
LOVIS.
You've done what men of honour ought to do,
What in your cause we would have done for you.
BEAUFORT.
You speak the truth, we've but our duty done;
Prepare; duty's no obligation.          [He strips.]
None come into the field to weigh what's right,
This is no place for counsel, but for fight.

And so on. The new style was at once taken up by the Howards, Killegrews, and Orrerys, and became, as we have seen, the rage for at least fourteen years.

But the serious portion of The Comical Revenge is not worth considering in comparison with the value of the prose part. In the underplot, the gay, realistic scenes which give the play its sub-title of the “Tale of a Tub,” Etheredge virtually founded English comedy, as it was successively understood by Congreve, Goldsmith, and Sheridan. The Royalists had come back from France deeply convinced of the superiority of Paris in all matters belonging to the business of the stage. Immediately upon the Restoration, in 1661, an unknown hand had printed an English version of the Menteur of Corneille. Lower had translated the tragedies of that poet ten years before, and had returned from his exile in Holland with the dramas of Quinault in his hand. But the great rush of Royalists back to England had happened just too soon to give them an opportunity of witnessing the advent of Molière. By the end of 1659 the exiled Court, hovering on the Dutch frontier, had transferred their attention from Paris to London. A few months before this, Molière and his troop had entered Paris, and an unobtrusive performance of L'Étourdi had gradually led to other triumphs and to the creation of the greatest modern school of comedy. What gave The Comical Revenge of Etheredge its peculiar value and novelty was that it had been written by a man who had seen and understood L'Étourdi, Le Dépit Amoureux, and Les Précieuses Ridicules. Etheredge loitered long enough in Paris for Molière to be revealed to him, and then he hastened back to England with a totally new idea of what comedy ought to be.

The real hero of the first three comedies of Molière is Mascarille, and in like manner the farcical interest of The Comical Revenge centres around a valet, Dufoy. When the curtain went up on the first scene, the audience felt that a new thing was being presented to them, new types and an unfamiliar method. Hitherto Ben Jonson had been the one example and theoretical master of all popular comedy. The great aim had been to hold some extravagance of character up to ridicule, to torture one monstrous ineptitude a thousand ways, to exhaust the capabilities of the language in fantastic quips and humours. The comedian had been bound to be in some sort a moralist, to lash himself into an ethical rage about something, and to work by a process of evolution rather than by passionless observation of external manners. Under such a system wit might flourish, but there was no room for humour, in the modern acceptation of the word, for humor takes things quietly, watches unobtrusively, and is at heart sublimely indifferent. Now, the Royalists had come home from exile weary of all moral discussion, apt to let life slip, longing above all things for rest and pleasure and a quiet hour. It was a happy instinct that led Etheredge to improve a little on Molière himself, and simply hold up the mirror of his play to the genial, sensual life of the young gentlemen his contemporaries. The new-found motto of French comedy, castigat ridendo mores, would have lain too heavy on English shoulders, the time of castigation was over, and life flowed merrily down to the deluge of the Revolution. The master of Dufoy, Sir Frederick Frollick, is not a type, but a portrait; and each lazy, periwigged fop in the pit clapped hands to welcome a friend that seemed to have just strolled from the Mulberry Garden. He is a man of quality, who can fight at need with great spirit and firmness of nerve, but whose customary occupation is the pursuit of pleasure without dignity and without reflection. Like all Etheredge's fine gentlemen, he is a finished fop, although he has the affectation of not caring for the society of fine ladies. He spends hours at his toilet, and “there never was a girl more humorsome nor tedious in the dressing of her baby.” It seems to me certain that Etheredge intended Sir Frederick as a portrait of himself. Dufoy gives an amusing account of his being taken into Sir Frederick's service. He was lounging on the new bridge in Paris, watching the marionettes and eating custard, when young M. de Grandville drove by in his chariot, in company with his friend, Sir Fred. Frollick, and recommended Dufoy as a likely fellow to be entrusted with some delicate business, which he carried out so well, that Sir Frederick made him his valet. The Comical Revenge is a series of brisk and entertaining scenes strung on a very light thread of plot. Sir Frederick plays fast and loose, all through, with a rich widow who wants to marry him; a person called Wheedle, with an accomplice, Palmer, who dresses up to personate a Buckinghamshire drover, plays off the confidence-trick on a stupid knight, Sir Nicholas Cully, quite in the approved manner of to-day. This pastime, called “coney-catching” a century earlier, was by this time revived under the title of “bubbling.” By a pleasant amenity of the printer's the rogues say to one another, “Expect your Kew,” meaning “cue.” Meanwhile high love affairs, jealousies, and a tremendous duel, interrupted by the treachery of Puritan villains, have occupied the heroic scenes. The comedy grows fast and furious; Sir Nicholas rides to visit the widow on a tavern-boy's back, with three bottles of wine suspended on a cord behind him. Sir Frederick frightens the widow by pretending to be dead, and Dufoy, for being troublesome and spiteful, is confined by his fellow-servants in a tub, with his head and hands, stuck out of holes, and stumbles up and down the stage in that disguise. A brief extract will give a notion of the sprightly and picturesque manner of the dialogue. A lady has sent her maid to Sir Frederick's lodgings to capitulate with him on his boisterousness.

BEAUFORT.
Jenny in tears! what's the occasion, poor girl?
MAID.
I'll tell you, my Lord.
SIR Fred.
Buzz! Set not her tongue a-going again; she has made more noise than half a dozen paper-mills; London Bridge at low water is silence to her; in a word, rambling last night, we knocked at her mistress's lodging, they denied us entrance, whereat a harsh word or two flew out.
MAID.
These were not all your heroic actions; pray tell the consequences, how you marched bravely at the rear of an army of link-boys; upon the sudden, how you gave defiance, and then, having waged a bloody war with the constable, and having vanquished that dreadful enemy, how you committed a general massacre on the glass windows. Are not these most honourable achievements, such as will be registered to your eternal fame by the most learned historian of Hicks's Hall?
SIR Fred.
Good, sweet Jenny, let's come to a treaty; do but hear what articles I propose.

The success of The Comical Revenge was unprecedented, and it secured its author an instant popularity. While it was under rehearsal, it attracted the attention of the young Lord Buckhurst, then distinguished only as a Parliamentary man of promise, but soon to become famous as the poet Earl of Dorset. To him Etheredge dedicated his play, and by him was introduced to that circle of wits, Buckingham, Sedley, and the precocious Rochester, with whom he was to be associated for the rest of his life.

Four years later he produced another and a better play. Meanwhile English comedy had made great advances. Dryden and Wilson had proceeded; Sedley, Shadwell, the Howards, had made their first appearance; but none of these, not even the author of The Mulberry Garden, had quite understood the nature of Etheredge's innovation. In She Would if She Could he showed them more plainly what he meant, for he had himself come under the influence of a masterpiece of comedy. It is certain to me that the movement of She Would if She Could is founded upon a reminiscence of Tartuffe, which, however, was not printed until 1669, “une comedie dont on a fait beaucoup de bruit, qui a esté longtemps persecutée.” Etheredge may have been present at the original performance of the first three acts, at Versailles, in May 1664; but it seems to me more probable that he saw the public representation at Paris in the summer of 1667, and that he hastened back to England with the plot of his own piece taking form in his brain. The only similarity between the French and English plays is this, that Lady Cockwood is a female Tartuffe, a woman of loud religious pretensions, who demands respect and devotion for her piety, and who is really engaged, all the time, in the vain prosecution of a disgraceful intrigue. Sir Oliver Cockwood, a boisterous, elderly knight, has come up to town for the season, in company with his pious lady, who leads him a sad life, with an old friend, Sir Jocelyn Jolly, and with the wards of the latter, two spirited girls called Ariana and Gatty. These people have taken lodgings in St. James's Street, at the “Black Posts,” as Mrs. Sentry, the maid, takes pains to inform young Mr. Courtall, a gentleman of fashion in whom Lady Cockwood takes an interest less ingenuous than she pretends. The scene, therefore, instead of being laid in Arcadia or Cockayne, sets us down in the heart of the West End, the fashionable quarter of the London of 1668. The reader who has not studied old maps, or the agreeable books of Mr. Wheatley, is likely to be extremely ill-informed as to the limits and scope of the town two hundred years ago. St. James's Street, which contained all the most genteel houses, ran, a sort of rural road, from Portugal Street, or Piccadilly, down to St. James's Park. One of Charles II.'s first acts was to beautify this district. St. James's Park, which then included Green Park, had been a sort of open meadow. The King cut a canal through it, planted it with lime-trees, and turned the path that led through St. James's Fields into a drive called Pall Mall. In St. James's Street rank and fashion clustered, and young poets contended for the honour of an invitation to Mr. Waller's house on the west side. Here also the country gentry lodged when they came up to town, and a few smart shops had recently been opened to supply the needs of people of quality.

Such was the bright scene of that comedy of fashionable life of which She Would if She Could gives us a faithful picture. In a town still untainted by smoke and dirt, with fresh country airs blowing over it from all quarters but the east, the gay world of Charles II.'s court ran through its bright ephemeral existence. There is no drama in which the physical surroundings of this life are so picturesquely brought before us as that of Etheredge. The play at present under discussion distinguishes itself from the comic work of Dryden, or Wycherley, or Shadwell, even from that of Congreve, by the little graphic touches, the intimate impression, the clear, bright colour of the scenes. The two girls, Sir Jocelyn's wards, finding life dreary with Lady Cockwood and her pieties, put on vizards, and range the Parks and the Mall without a chaperon. This is an artful contrivance, often afterwards imitated—as notably by Lord Lansdowne in his She Gallants—but original to Etheredge, and very happy, from the opportunity it gives of drawing out naïve remarks on familiar things; for in the second act the girls find their way to the Mulberry Garden, a public place of entertainment, adjoining Lord Arlington's mansion of Goring House, afterwards Buckingham Palace, and much frequented by a public whom Cromwell's sense of propriety had deprived of their favourite Spring Garden. Here Ariana and Gatty meet Lady Cockwood's recalcitrant spark Courtall, walking with his friend Freeman, and from behind their masks carry on with them a hazardous flirtation. The end of this scene, when the two sprightly girls break from their gallants and appear and reappear, crossing the stage from opposite corners, amid scenery that reminded every one in the theatre of the haunt most loved by Londoners, must have been particularly delightful and diverting to witness; and all these are circumstances which we must bear in mind if we wish the drama of the Restoration to be a living thing to us in reading it. It was a mundane entertainment, but in its earthly sincerity it superseded something that had ceased to be either human or divine.

The two old knights are “harp and violin—nature has tuned them to play the fool in concert,” and their extravagances hurry the plot to its crisis. They swagger to their own confusion, and Lady Cockwood encourages their folly, that she herself may have an opportunity of meeting Courtall. She contrives to give him an appointment in the New Exchange, which seems to have been a sort of arcade leading out of the Strand, with shops on each side. When the curtain rises for the third act, Mrs. Trinkett is sitting in the door of her shop inviting the people of quality to step in: “What d'ye buy? What d'ye lack, gentlemen? Gloves, ribbands, and essences? ribbands, gloves, and essences?” She is a woman of tact, who, under the pretence of selling “a few fashionable toys to keep the ladies in countenance at a play or in the park,” passes letters or makes up rendezvous between people of quality. At her shop the gallants “scent their eyebrows and periwigs with a little essence of oranges or jessamine”; and so Courtall occupies himself till Lady Cockwood arrives. Fortunately for him, Ariana and Gatty, who are out shopping, arrive at the same moment; so he proposes to take them all in his coach to the “Bear” in Drury Lane for a dance. The party at the “Bear” is like a scene from some artistically mounted drama of our own day. Etheredge, with his singular eye for colour, crowds the stage with damsels in sky-blue, and pink, and flamecoloured taffetas. To them arrive Sir Oliver and Sir Jocelyn; but as Sir Oliver was drunk overnight, Lady Cockwood has locked up all his clothes, except his russet suit of humiliation, in which he is an object of ridicule and persecution to all the bright crowd who—

Wave the gay wreathe, and titter as they prance.

In this scene Etheredge introduces a sword, a velvet coat, a flageolet, a pair of bands, with touches that remind one of Metzu or Gheraerdt Douw. Sir Oliver, who is the direct prototype of Vanbrugh's Sir John Brute, gets very drunk, dances with his own wife in her vizard, and finally brings confusion upon the whole company. The ladies rush home, whither Freeman comes to console Lady Cockwood; a noise is heard; and he is promptly concealed in a cupboard. Courtall enters, and then a fresh hubbub is heard, for Sir Oliver has returned. Courtall is hurried under a table just in time for the old knight to come in and perceive nothing. But he has brought a beautiful china orange home to appease his wife, and as he shows this to her it drops from his fingers, and runs under the table where Courtall lies. The maid, a girl of resource, promptly runs away with the candle, and, in the stage darkness, Courtall is hurried into the cupboard, where he finds Freeman. The threads are gradually unravelled: Courtall and Freeman are rewarded, for nothing in particular, by the hands of Ariana and Gatty, and Lady Cockwood promises to go back to the country and behave properly ever after. The plot of so slight a thing is a gossamer fabric, and scarcely bears analysis; but the comedy was by far the most sprightly performance at that time presented to any audience in Europe save that which was listening to Molière.

Etheredge had not dedicated She Would if She Could to any patron; but the grateful town accepted it with enthusiasm, and its author was the most popular of the hour. It was confidently hoped that he would give his energies to the stage; but an indolence that was habitual to him, and against which he never struggled, kept him silent for eight years. During this time, however, he preserved his connection with the theatres, encouraged Medbourne the actor to translate Tartuffe, and wrote an epilogue for him when that play was first produced in England in 1670. He wrote, besides, a great number of little amatory pieces, chiefly in octosyllabics, which have never been collected. Oldys says, in one of his MS. notes, that he once saw a Miscellany, printed in 1672, almost full of verses by Etheredge, but without his name. I have not been able to trace this; but most of the numerous collections of contemporary verse contained something of his, down to the Miscellany of 1701. If anyone took the trouble to extract these, at least fifty or sixty poems could be put together; but they are none of them very good. Etheredge had but little of the lyrical gift of such contemporaries as Dryden, Rochester, and Sedley; his rhymed verse is apt to be awkward and languid. This may be as good an opportunity as any other of quoting the best song of his that I have been able to unearth:—

Ye happy swains, whose hearts are free
          From love's imperial chain,
Take warning and be taught by me
          To avoid th' enchanting pain;
Fatal the wolves to trembling flocks,
          Fierce winds to blossoms prove,
To careless seamen, hidden rocks,
          To human quiet—love.
Fly the fair sex, if bliss you prize—
          The snake's beneath the flower;
Who ever gazed on beauteous eyes
          And tasted quiet more?
How faithless is the lovers' joy!
          How constant is their care!
The kind with falsehood do destroy,
          The cruel with despair.

We learn from Shadwell, in the preface to The Humorists of 1671, that the success of She Would if She Could was endangered by the slovenly playing of the actors. This may have helped to disgust the fastidious Etheredge. At all events, the satirists began to be busy with the name of so inert a popular playwright; and, in 1675, Rochester expressed a general opinion in the doggerel of his Session of the Poets:—

Now Apollo had got gentle George in his eye,
And frankly confessed that, of all men that writ,
There's none had more fancy, sense, judgment, and wit;
But i' the crying sin, idleness, he was so hardened
That his long seven years' silence was not to be pardoned.

“Gentle George” gave way, and composed, with all the sparkle, wit, and finish of which he was capable, his last and best-known piece, The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter, brought out at the Duke's Theatre in the summer of 1676. Recollecting his threatened fiasco in 1668, Etheredge determined to put himself under powerful patronage, and dedicated his new play to Mary of Modena, the young Duchess of York, who remained his faithful patroness until fortune bereft her of the power to give. Sir Car Scroope wrote the prologue, Dryden the epilogue, and the play was acted by the best company of the time—Betterton, Harris, Medbourn, and the wife of Shadwell, while the part of Belinda was in all probability taken by the matchless Mrs. Barry, the new glory of the stage.

The great merit of The Man of Mode rests in the brilliance of the writing and the force of the characterisation. There is no plot. People of the old school, like Captain Alexander Radcliffe, who liked plot above all other things in a comedy, decried the manner of Etheredge, and preferred to it “the manly art of brawny Wycherley,” the new writer, whose Country Wife had just enjoyed so much success; but, on the whole, the public was dazzled and delighted with the new types and the brisk dialogue, and united to give Sir Fopling Flutter a warmer welcome than greeted any other stage-hero during Charles II.'s reign. There was a delightful heroine, with abundance of light brown hair, and lips like the petals of “a Provence rose, fresh on the bush, ere the morning sun has quite drawn up the dew;” there was a shoemaker whom everyone knew, and an orange-woman whom everybody might have known—characters which Dickens would have laughed at and commended; there was Young Bellair, in which Etheredge drew his own portrait; there was the sparkling Dorimant, so dressed that all the pit should know that my Lord Rochester was intended; there was Medley, Young Bellair's bosom friend, in whom the gossips discovered the portrait of Sir Charles Sedley; above all, there was Sir Fopling Flutter, the monarch of all beaux and dandies, the froth of Parisian affectation—a delightful personage, almost as alive to us to-day as to the enchanted audience of 1676. During two acts the great creature was spoken of, but never seen. Just arrived from France, all the world had heard about him, and was longing to see him, “with a pair of gloves up to his elbows, and his periwig more exactly curled than a lady's head newly dressed for a ball.” At last, in the third act, when curiosity has been raised to a fever, the fop appears. He is introduced to a group of ladies and gentlemen of quality, and when the first civilities are over he begins at once to criticise their dress:—

LADY Townley.
Wit, I perceive, has more power over you than beauty, Sir Fopling, else you would not have let this lady stand so long neglected.
SIR Fopling
(to Emilia). A thousand pardons, Madam! Some civilities due of course upon the meeting a long absent friend. The éclat of so much beauty, I confess, ought to have charmed me sooner.
EMILIA.
The brilliant of so much good language, sir, has much more power than the little beauty I can boast.
SIR Fopling.
I never saw anything prettier than this high work on your point d'Espagne.
EMILIA.
'Tis not so rich as point de Venise.
SIR Fop.
Not altogether, but looks cooler, and is more proper for the season. Dorimant, is not that Medley?
DORI.
The same, sir.
SIR Fop.
Forgive me, sir, in this embarras of civilities, I could not come to have you in my arms sooner. You understand an equipage the best of any man in town, I hear!
MEDLEY.
By my own you would not guess it.
SIR Fop.
There are critics who do not write, sir. Have you taken notice of the calèche I brought over?
MEDLEY.
O yes! it has quite another air than the English make.
SIR Fop.
'Tis as easily known from an English tumbrel as an inns-of-court man is from one of us.
DORI.
Truly there is a bel-air in calèches as well as men.
MEDLEY.
But there are few so delicate as to observe it.
SIR Fop.
The world is generally very grossier here indeed.
LADY Townley.
He's very fine (looking at Sir Fop).
EMILIA.
Extreme proper.
SIR Fop.
O, a slight suit I had made to appear in at my first arrival—not worthy your admiration, ladies.
DORI.
The pantaloon is very well mounted.
SIR Fop.
The tassels are new and pretty.
MEDLEY.
I never saw a coat better cut.
SIR Fop.
It makes me look long-waisted, and, I think, slender.
LADY Townley.
His gloves are well-fingered, large, and graceful.
SIR Fop.
I was always eminent for being bien-ganté.
EMILIA.
He must wear nothing but what are originals of the most famous hands in Paris!
SIR Fop.
You are in the right, Madam.
LADY Townley.
The suit?
SIR Fop.
Barroy.
EMILIA.
The garniture?
SIR Fop.
Le Gras.
MEDLEY.
The shoes?
SIR Fop.
Piccat.
DORI.
The periwig?
SIR Fop.
Chedreux.
LADY Townley and Emilia
(together). The gloves?
SIR Fop.
Orangerie (holding up his hands to them). You know the smell, ladies?

The hand that throws in these light touches, in a key of rose-colour on pale gray, no longer reminds us of Molière, but exceedingly of Congreve. A recent critic has very justly remarked that in mere wit, the continuity of brilliant dialogue in which the action does not seek to advance, Moliere is scarcely the equal of Congreve at his best, and the brightest scenes of The Man of Mode show the original direction taken by Etheredge in that line which was more specially to mark the triumph of English comedy. But the author of Love for Love was still in the nursery when The Man of Mode appeared, as it were, to teach him how to write. Until Congreve reached manhood, Etheredge's example seemed to have been lost, and the lesson he attempted to instil to have fallen on admiring hearers that were incapable of repeating it. The shallowness, vivacity, and vanity of Sir Fopling are admirably maintained. In the scene of which part has just been quoted, after showing his intimate knowledge of all the best tradesmen in Paris, some one drops the name of Bussy, to see if he is equally at home among literary notabilities. But he supposes that Bussy d'Ambois is meant, and is convicted of having never heard of Bussy Rabutin. This is a curiously early notice of a famous writer who survived it nearly twenty years; it does not seem that any French critic has observed this. Sir Fopling Flutter is so eminently the best of Etheredge's creations that we are tempted to give one more sample of his quality. He has come with two or three other sparks to visit Dorimant at his rooms, and he dances a pas seul.

YOUNG Bellair.
See! Sir Fopling is dancing!
SIR Fop.
Prithee, Dorimant, why hast thou not a glass hung up here? A room is the dullest thing without one.
Y. Bell.
Here is company to entertain you.
SIR Fop.
But I mean in case of being alone. In a glass a man may entertain himself,———
DORI.
The shadow of himself indeed.
SIR Fop.
Correct the errors of his motion and his dress.
MEDLEY.
I find, Sir Fopling, in your solitude you remember the saying of the wise man, and study yourself!
SIR Fop.
'Tis the best diversion in our retirements. Dorimant, thou art a pretty fellow, and wearest thy clothes well, but I never saw thee have a handsome cravat. Were they made up like mine, they'd give another air to thy face. Prithee let me send my man to dress thee one day. By heavens, an Englishman cannot tie a ribband.
DORI.
They are something clumsy fisted.
SIR Fop.
I have brought over the prettiest fellow that ever spread a toilet, he served some time under Merille, the greatest génie in the world for a valet de chambre.
DORI.
What, he who formerly belonged to the Duke of Candolle?
SIR Fop.
The very same—and got him his immortal reputation.
DORI.
You've a very fine brandenburgh on, Sir Fopling!
SIR Fop.
It serves to wrap me up after the fatigue of a ball.
MEDLEY.
I see you often in it, with your periwig tied up.
SIR Fop.
We should not always be in a set dress; 'tis more en cavalier to appear now and then in a deshabille.

In these wholly fantastical studies of manners we feel less than in the more serious portions of the comedy the total absence of moral purpose, high aim, or even honourable instinct which was the canker of the age. A negligence that pervaded every section of the upper classes, which robbed statesmen of their patriotism and the clergy of their earnestness, was only too exactly mirrored in the sprightly follies of the stage. Yet even there we are annoyed by a heroine who is discovered eating a nectarine, and who, rallied on buying a “filthy nosegay,” indignantly rebuts the accusation, and declares that nothing would induce her to smell such vulgar flowers as stocks and carnations, or anything that blossoms, except orange-flowers and tuberose. It is a frivolous world, Strephon bending on one knee to Cloe, who fans the pink blush on her painted cheek, while Momus peeps, with a grin, through the curtains behind her. They form an engaging trio, mais ce n'est pas la vie humaine.

The Man of Mode was licensed on June 3, 1676; it enjoyed an unparalleled success, and before the month was out its author was flying for his life. We learn this from the Hatton Correspondence, first printed in 1879. It seems that in the middle of June, Etheredge, Rochester, and two friends, Captain Bridges and Mr. Downes, went down to Epsom on a Sunday night. They were tossing some fiddlers in a blanket for refusing to play, when a barber, who came to see what the noise was, as a practical joke, induced them to knock up the constable. They did so with a vengeance, for they smashed open his door, entered his house, and broke his head, giving him a severe beating. At last they were overpowered by the watch, and Etheredge having made a submissive oration, the row seemed to be at an end, when suddenly Lord Rochester, like a coward as he was, drew his sword on the constable, who had dismissed his men. The constable shrieked out “Murder!” and the watch returning, one of them broke the skull of Downes with his staff. The others ran away, and the watchmen were left to run poor Downes through with a pike. He lingered until the 29th, when Charles Hatton records that he is dead, and that Etheredge and Rochester have absconded. Four years afterwards the Hatton Correspondence gives us another glimpse of our poet, again in trouble. On January 14, 1680, the roof of the tennis-court in the Haymarket fell down. “Sir George Etheridge and several others were very dangerously hurt. Sir Charles Sidley had his skull broke, and it is thought it will be mortal.” Sidley, or Sedley, flourished for twenty years more; but we may note that here, for the first time, our dramatist is “Sir George.” It is evident that he had been knighted since 1676, when he was plain “George Etheredge, Esq.” In an MS. poem called The Present State of Matrimony, he is accused of having married a rich widow to facilitate his being knighted, and with success. The entries in The Letterbook give me reason to believe that he was not maligned in this. But he seems to have lived on very bad terms with his wife, and to have disgraced himself by the open protection of Mrs. Barry, after Rochester's death in 1680. By this famous actress, whose name can no more be omitted from the history of literature than that of Mrs. Gwynn from the history of statecraft, he had a daughter, on whom he settled five or six thousand pounds, but who died young.

The close of Etheredge's career was spent in the diplomatic service. When this commenced is more than I have been able to discover. From The Letterbook it appears that he was for some time envoy of Charles II. at the Hague. It would even seem that he was sent to Constantinople, for a contemporary satirist speaks of

Ovid to Pontus sent for too much wit,
Etheredge to Turkey for the want of it.

Certain expressions in The Letterbook make me suspect that he had been in Sweden. But it is not until the accession of James II. that his figure comes out into real distinctness. In this connection I think it would be hard to exaggerate the value of The Letterbook, which I am about to introduce to my readers. After reading it from end to end I feel that I know Sir George Etheredge, hitherto the most phantasmal of the English poets, better than I can know any literary man of his time, better than Dryden, better, perhaps, than Milton.

In February 1685 James II. ascended the throne, and by March, Mary of Modena had worked so assiduously for her favourite that this warrant, for the discovery of which I owe my best thanks to Mr. Noel Sainsbury, was entered in the Privy Signet Book:—

Warrant to pay Sir Geo. Etheredge (whom his Maj. has thought fit to employ in his service in Germany), 3l. per diem.

On March 5 The Letterbook was bought, and Etheredge and his secretary started for the Continent. Why they loitered at the Hague and in Amsterdam does not appear, but their journey was made in so leisurely a manner that they did not arrive in Ratisbon until August 30. It does appear, however, that the dissipated little knight behaved very ill in Holland, and spent one summer's night dead drunk in the streets of the Hague. On his arrival at Ratisbon, he had two letters of recommendation, one from Barillon to the French ambassador, the other from the Spanish ambassador to the Burgundian minister. The first of these he used at once, and cultivated the society at the French Embassy in a way that would have been extremely impolitic if it had not, without doubt, been entered upon in accordance with instructions from home. It was doubtless known to Etheredge, although a secret at the German court, that James had commenced his reign by opening private negotiations with France. The poet settled in a very nice house, with a garden running down to the Danube, set up a carriage and good horses, valets, and “a cook, though I cannot hope to be well-served by the latter” in this barbarous Germany. On December 24 he wrote two letters, parts of which may be quoted here. To Lord Sunderland he writes:—

Since my coming here I have had a little fever, which has been the reason I have not paid my duty so regular as I ought to do to your Lordship. I am now pretty well recovered, and hope I am quit at a reasonable price for what I was to pay on the change of climate, and a greater change in my manner of living. Is it not enough to breed an ill habit of body in a man who was used to sit up till morning to be forced, for want of knowing what to do with himself, to go to bed in the evening; one who has been used to live with all freedom, never to approach anyone without ceremony; one who has been used to run up and down to find variety of company, to sit at home and entertain himself in solitude? One would think the Diet had made a Reichsgut-achten to banish all pastimes in the city. Here was the Countess of Nostitz, but malice would not let her live in quiet, and she is lately removed to Prague. Good company met at her house, and she had a little hombre to entertain them. A more commode lady, by what I hear, never kept a basset [table] in London. If I do well after all this, you must allow me to be a great philosopher; and I dare affirm Cato left not the world with more firmness of soul than I did England.

And to a friend in Paris, on the same date:—

Le divertissement le plus galant du pays cet hiver c'est le traîneau, où l'on se met en croupe de quelque belle Allemande, de manière que vous ne pouvez ni la voir, ni lui parler, à cause d'un diable de tintamarre des sonnettes dont les harnais sont tous garnis.

In short, he very soon learned the limitations of the place. His letters are filled with complaints of the boorish manners of the people, the dreary etiquette which encumbers the Court and the Diet, and the solitude he feels in being separated from all his literary friends. The malice of the secretary informs us that Sir George soon gave up his precise manner of living, and adopted a lazier style. He seldom rose until two or three p.m., dined at five or six, and then went to the French ambassador's for three or four hours. Finding time hang heavy on his hands, he took to gaming with any disreputable Frenchman that happened to pass through the town. Already, early in 1686, a scoundrel called Purpurat, from Vienna, has got round him by flatteries and presents of tobacco, and has robbed him of 10,000 crowns at cards. When, however, things have come to this pass, Etheredge wakes up, and on the suggestion of M. Purpurat, that he will be going back to Vienna, detains him until he has won nearly all his money back again, and finally escapes with the loss of a pair of pistols, with his crest upon them, which Purpurat shows in proof of his ascendency over the English ambassador.

These matters occupy the spring and summer of 1686, but there is nothing said about them in the letters home. These letters, however, are cheerful enough. In January he encloses, with his dispatches to the Earl of Middleton, a long squib in octosyllabic verse, which the English minister, who is ill at these numbers, gets Dryden to answer in kind. A cancelled couplet in the first draft of the former remarks:—

Let them who live in plenty flout;
I must make shift with sour kraut.

In June 1686 he writes to Middleton that he has “not this week received any letter from England, which is a thing that touches me here as nearly as ever a disappointment did in London with the woman I loved most tenderly.” Middleton comforts him by telling him that the king, after a performance of The Man of Mode, remarked to him that he expected Etheredge to put on the sock, and write a new comedy while he was at Ratisbon. Once or twice, in subsequent letters, the poet refers to this idea; but the weight of affairs, combined with his native indolence, prevented his attempting the task. Meanwhile, he does not seem to have neglected his duty, as it was understood in those days. He writes, so he says at least, twice every week about state matters to Middleton, and, notwithstanding all the spiteful messages sent home about him, he does not seem to have ever lost the confidence of James and his ministers. These latter were most of them his private friends, and in his most official communications he suddenly diverges into some waggish allusion to old times. His attitude at Ratisbon was not what we should now demand from an envoy. The English people, the English Parliament, do not exist for him; his one standard of duty is the personal wish of the king. By indulging the bias of James, which indeed was his own bias, an excessive partiality for all things French, he won himself, as we shall see, the extreme ill-will of the Germans. But the only really serious scrape into which he got, an affair which annoyed him throughout the autumn and winter of 1686, does not particularly redound to his discredit. It is a curious story, and characteristic of the times; The Letterbook, by giving Etheredge's own account, and also the secretary's spiteful rendering, enables us to follow the circumstances pretty closely. A troop of actors from Nuremburg came over to Ratisbon in the summer of 1686, with a star who seems to have been the leading actress of her time in South Germany. This lady, about whom the only biographical fact that we discover is that her Christian name was Julia, seems to have been respectability itself. Even the enemies of Etheredge did not suggest that any immoral connection existed between them, and on the last day of the year, after having suffered all sorts of annoyance on her behalf, he still complains that she is as fière as she is fair. But actors were then still looked upon in Germany, as to some extent even in France, as social pariahs, vagabonds whom it was disgraceful to know, except as servants of a high order; artistic menials, whose vocation it was to amuse the great. But England was already more civilised than this; Etheredge was used to meet Betterton and his stately wife at the court of his monarch, and even the sullied reputation of such lovely sinners as Mrs. Barry did not shut them out of Whitehall. Etheredge, therefore, charmed in his Abdera of letters by the art and wit and beauty of Julia, paid her a state visit in his coach, and prayed for the honour of a visit in return. Ratisbon was beside itself with indignation. Every sort of social insult was heaped upon the English envoy. At a fête champêtre the lubberly Germans crowded out their elbows so as to leave him no place at table; the grand ladies cut him in the street when their coaches met his, and it was made a subject of venomous report to England that, in spite of public opinion, he refused to quit the acquaintance of the comédienne, as they scornfully named her. At last, on the evening of November 25, a group of students and young people of quality, who had heard that Julia was dining with the English ambassador to meet the French envoy and one or two guests, surrounded Etheredge's house in masks, threw stones at the windows, shouted “Great is Diana of the English envoy!” and, on Etheredge's appearing, roared to him to throw out to them the comédienne. The plucky little poet answered by arming his lacqueys and his maids with sword-sticks, pokers, and whatever came to hand, and by suddenly charging the crowd at the head of his little garrison. The Germans were routed for a moment, and Etheredge took advantage of his success to put Julia into his coach, jump in beside her, and conduct her to her lodging. The crowd, however, was too powerful for him; and though she slept that night in safety, next day she was thrown into prison by the magistrates, for causing a disturbance in the streets.

Etheredge, not knowing what to do, wrote this epistle to the ring-leader of the attack on his house, the Baron von Sensheim:—

J'estois surpris d'apprendre que ce joly gentil-homme travesty en Italien hier au soir estoit le Baron de Sensheim. Je ne savois pas que les honnetes gens se méloient avec des lacquais ramassez pour faire les fanfarons, et les batteurs de pavéz. Si vous avez quelque chose à me dire, faites le moy savoir comme vous devez, et ne vous amusez plus à venir insulter mes Domestiques ni ma maison, soyez content que vous l'avez échappé belle et ne retournez plus chercher les récompences de telles follies pour vos beaux compagnons. J'ay des autres mesures à prendre avec eux.

To this he received a vague and impertinent reply in German. Opinion in the town was so strongly moved, that for some time Etheredge never went out without having a musketoon in his coach, and each of his footmen armed with a brace of pistols ready charged. Eventually the lady was released, on the understanding that she and her company should leave the town, which they did, proceeding in the last days of 1686 across the Danube to Bayrischenhoff, where Etheredge visited them. It was in the midst of this turmoil that Etheredge composed some of his best occasional verses. I do not think they have ever been printed before:—

Upon the downs when shall I breathe at ease,
Have nothing else to do but what I please,
In a fresh cooling shade upon the brink
Of Arden's spring, have time to read and think,
And stretch, and sleep, when all my care shall be
For health, and pleasure my philosophy?
When shall I rest from business, noise, and strife,
Lay down the soldier's and the courtier's life,
And in a little melancholy seat
Begin at last to live and to forget
The nonsense and the farce of what the fools call great.

There is something strangely Augustan about this fragment; we should expect it to be dated 1716 rather than 1686, and to be signed by some Pomfret or Tickell of the school of Addison.

On New Year's Day, 1687, he encloses in a letter to the Earl of Middleton a French song, inspired by Julia, which may deserve to be printed as a curiosity. I give it in the author's spelling, which shone more in French than English:—

Garde le secret de ton ame,
          Et ne te laisse pas flatter,
Qu'Iris espargnera ta flamme,
          Si tu luy permets d'éclater;
Son humeur, à l'amour rebelle,
          Exile tous ses doux desirs,
Et la tendresse est criminelle
          Qui veut luy parler en soupirs.
Puis que tu vis sous son empire,
          Il faut luy cacher ton destin,
Si tu ne veux le rendre pire
          Percé du trait de son dédain;
D'une rigeur si delicate
          Ton cœur ne peut rien esperer,
Derobe donc à cette ingrate
La vanité d'en trionfer.

In February a change of ministry in London gives him something else to think about; he hears a report that he is to be sent to Stockholm; he writes eagerly to his patrons for news. On the eleventh of the month he receives a tremendous snub from the treasury about his extravagance, and is told that in future his extra expenses must never exceed fifty pounds every three months. He is, indeed, assailed with many annoyances, for his wife writes on the subject of the comédienne from Nuremburg, and roundly calls him a rogue. Upon this Etheredge writes to the poet, Lord Mulgrave, and begs him to make up the quarrel, sending by the same post, on March 13, 1687, this judicious letter to Lady Etheredge:—

My Lady,

I beg your pardon for undertaking to advise you. I am so well satisfied by your last letter of your prudence and judgment that I shall never more commit the same error. I wish there were copies of it in London that it might serve as a pattern to modest wives to write to their husbands; you shall find me so careful hereafter how I offend you that I will no more subscribe myself your loving, since you take it ill, but,

Madam,

Y^r. most dutyfull husband,

G. E.

His letters of 1687 are very full of personal items and scraps of literary gossip. It would be impossible on this, the first introduction of The Letterbook, to do justice to all its wealth of allusion. He carefully repeats the harangue of the Siamese ambassadors on leaving the German court; he complains again and again of the neglect of the Count of Windisgrätz, who represents the Prince of Nassau, and is all powerful in the Palatinate; he complains still more bitterly of the open rudeness of the Countess Windisgrätz; he is anxious about the welfare of Nat Lee, at that time shut up in a lunatic asylum, but about to emerge for the production of The Princess of Cleve, in 1689, and then to die; he writes a delightful letter to Betterton, on May 26, 1687, asking for news of all kinds about the stage. He says that his chief diversion is music, that he has three musicians living in the house, that they play all the best operas, and that a friend in Paris sends him whatever good music is published. One wonders whether Etheredge knew that Jean Baptiste Lully had died a week or two before this letter was written. News of the success of Sedley's Bellamira reaches him in June 1687, and provokes from him this eloquent defence of his old friend's genius:—

I am glad the town has so good a taste as to give the same just applause to S^r. Charles Sidley's writing which his friends have always done to his conversation. Few of our plays can boast of more wit than I have heard him speak at a supper. Some barren sparks have found fault with what he has formerly done, only because the fairness of the soil has produced so big a crop. I daily drink his health, my Lord Dorset's, your own, and all our friends'.

A few allusions to famous men of letters, all made in 1687, may be placed side by side:—

Mr. Wynne has sent me The Hind and the Panther, by which I find John Dryden has a noble ambition to restore poetry to its ancient dignity in wrapping up the mysteries of religion in verse. What a shame it is to me to see him a saint, and remain still the same devil [myself].

Dryden finds his Macfleknoe does no good: I wish him better success with his Hind and Panther.

General Dryden is an expert captain, but I always thought him fitter for execution than council.

Remind my Lord Dorset how he and I carried two draggled-tailed nymphs one bitter frosty night over the Thames to Lambeth.

If he happens in a house with Mr. Crown, John's songs will charm the whole family.

A letter from Dryden, full of pleasant chat, informs Etheredge in February that Wycherley is sick of an apoplexy. The envoy begs leave, later in the year, to visit his friend, the Count de Thun, whose acquaintance he made in Amsterdam, and who is now at Munich, but permission is refused. In October the whole Electoral College invites itself to spend the afternoon in Sir George Etheredge's garden, who entertains them so lavishly, and with so little infusion of Danube water in the wine, that next morning he is ill in bed. His indisposition turns to tertian ague, and towards the end of the month he asks to be informed how quinine should be prepared. He compares himself philosophically to Falstaff, however, and by Christmas time grows pensive at the thought of the “plum-pottage” at home, and is solicitous about a black-laced hood and pair of scarlet stockings which he has ordered from London. In January 1688 he laments that Sedley has grown temperate and Dorset uxorious, but vows that he will be on his guard, and remain foppish. The last extract that has any literary interest is taken from a letter dated March 8, 1688:—

Mrs. Barry bears up as well as I myself have done; my poor Lord Rochester [Wilmot, not Hyde] could not weather the Cape, and live under the Line fatal to puling constitutions. Though I have given up writing plays, I should be glad to read a good one, wherefore pray let Will Richards send me Mr Shadwell's [The Squire of Alsatia] as soon as it is printed, that I may know what is being done. … Nature, you know, intended me for an idle fellow, and gave me passions and qualities fit for that blessed calling, but fortune has made a changeling of me, and necessity now forces me to set up for a fop of business.

Three days after this he writes the last letter preserved in The Letterbook, and, but for an appendix to that volume, we might have believed the popular story that Etheredge fell down stairs at Ratisbon and broke his neck. But the treacherous secretary continues to write in 1689, and gives us fresh particulars. He states that his quarrel with Sir George was that he had been promised 60l. per annum, and could only get 40l. out of his master. He further declares that to the last Etheredge did not know ten words of Dutch (German), and had not merely to make use of a French interpreter, but had to entrust his private business to one or other of his lacqueys; and that moreover he spent a great part of his time “visiting all the alehouses of the town, accompanied by his servants, his valet de chambre, his hoffmaster, and his dancing and fighting master, all with their coats turned inside outwards.” In his anger he lets us know what became of Etheredge at the Revolution, for in a virulent Latin harangue at the close of The Letterbook he states that after a stay at Ratisbon of “tres annos et sex menses,” accurately measured, for the secretary's cry is a cry for gold, Etheredge fled to Paris. This flight must therefore have taken place early in March 1689. “Quando hinc abijt ad asylum apud Gallos quærendum,” the poet left his books behind him, a proof that his taking leave was sudden and urgent. The secretary gives a list of them, and it is interesting to find the only play-books mentioned are Shakespeare's Works and the Œuvres de Molière, in 2 vols., probably the edition of 1682. I note also the works of Sarrazin and of Voiture.

At this point, I am sorry to say, the figure of Etheredge at present eludes me. There seems no clue whatever to the date of his death, except that in an anonymous pamphlet, written by John Dennis, and printed in 1722, Etheredge is spoken of as having been dead “nearly thirty years.” Dennis was over thirty at the Revolution, and is as trustworthy an authority as we could wish for. By this it would seem that Etheredge died about 1693, nearer the age of sixty than fifty. But Colonel Chester has the record of administration to the estate of a Dame Mary Etheredge, widow, dated Feb. 1, 1692. As we know of no other knight of the name, except Sir James Etheridge, who died in 1736, this was probably the poet's relict; and it may yet appear that he died in 1691. He was a short, brisk man, with a quantity of fair hair, and a fine complexion, which he spoiled by drinking. He left no children, but his brother, who long survived him, left a daughter, who is said to have married Aaron Hill.