On the 13th of January, 1667-8, (we are told by Pepys,) the ladies and the Duke of Monmouth acted _The Indian Emperour_ at court. The same chronicler says: _The Maiden Queene_ was "mightily commended for the regularity of it, and the strain and wit;" but of the _Ladys à la Mode_ he says it was "so mean a thing" that, when it was announced for the next night, the pit "fell a laughing, because the house was not a quarter full." But Dryden, as a playwright, does not enjoy the infamous honor of a high rank among his fellow-dramatists. The proper representations of the drama in that age were, in Comedy, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar; and, in Tragedy, Otway, Rowe, and Lee. WYCHERLEY.--Of the comedists of this period, where all were evil, William Wycherley was the worst. 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. His next, _The Double Dealer_, caused Dryden to proclaim him the equal of Shakspeare! Perhaps his most famous comedy is _Love for Love_, which is besides an excellent index to the morality of the age. The author was quoted and caressed; Pope dedicated to him his Translation of the Iliad; and Voltaire considered him the most successful English writer of comedy. His merit consists in some degree of originality, and in the liveliness of his colloquies. His wit is brilliant and flashing, but, in the words of Thackeray, the world to him "seems to have had no moral at all."