Note 129 — THE ART OF PAINTING;

I retain Mr Malone’s excellent note. “This description seems at the first view to be intended for Congreve, to whom it is certainly sufficiently applicable, and who had produced his ‘Double Dealer’ in the preceding year, and his ‘Love for Love’ in 1695. But beside that Dryden’s high admiration of Congreve, which he had so strongly manifested in the admirable verses addressed to that poet on the former play, will not admit of such an application, the words—‘I knew,’ clearly denote a dead poet, and consequently will exclude Wycherley also. The person meant therefore, I think, was Sir George Etherege, who died a few years before. In Dryden’s Epilogue to that author’s ‘Man of Mode,’ he says,