According to Wycherley's own statement _The Plain Dealer_ was written when the author was twenty-five years of age--_i.e._, in the year 1665-6.[87] Its first performance on the stage cannot have taken place later than the spring of 1674, as there is an interesting allusion to it in the preface to Dryden's _State of Innocence_, which was registered at Stationers' Hall, April 17, 1674. Dryden writes in terms of noble eulogy: "The author of _The Plain Dealer_, whom I am proud to call my friend, has obliged all honest and virtuous men by one of the most bold, most general, and most useful satires, which has ever been presented on the English theatre." _The Plain Dealer_ was brought forward by the King's Company, probably, like _The Country Wife_, at the house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, as the new theatre, in Drury Lane, was not opened until March 26 of that year. It was published three years later, in 1677, the title-page bearing the _imprimatur_--"Licensed Jan. 9, 1676, Roger L'Estrange." The license, of course, was for printing, not for acting; the date, in new style, would be 1677. We shall have, I think, little difficulty in accepting Wycherley's statement as to the year in which this play was written, if we suppose, as would almost certainly be the case, that it was revised and altered before its production on the stage. The critique on _The Country Wife_, in particular, cannot have been written earlier than 1672 or 1673, in one of which years that comedy was first acted. Of our author's four comedies _The Plain Dealer_ is, questionless, the most powerful. From the mock dedication to the epilogue "the satire, wit, and strength, of manly Wycherley"[88] are everywhere conspicuous and triumphant. The main purport of the plot, as well as the particular design of certain scenes, is borrowed from _Le Misanthrope_ of Molière, but it is almost a truism that the most original writers are frequently the most extensive plagiarists, and Wycherley has so overlaid his appropriations with the colouring of his own brilliant individuality, that his play appears almost equally a masterpiece of originality as of ingenuity. It is scarcely too much to say that in _The Plain Dealer_ we are conscious of a fertility of invention, a richness of wit and satire, which make even _Le Misanthrope_ seem tame in comparison. Voltaire has justly contrasted the two plays. "All Wycherley's strokes," he writes, "are stronger and bolder than those of our _Misanthrope_, but then they are less delicate, and the Rules of Decorum are not so well observed in this Play."[89]