CONGREVE, William, a younger brother of an ancient family in Staffordshire. His father was employed in the stewardship of the great estate of the Earl of Burlington in Ireland, where he resided many years, and where our author was born in the year 1672. Mr Congreve, when he came to England, entered into the Middle Temple, and began to study the law; but his bias was toward polite literature and poetry. His first performance was a novel entitled Incognita, or Love and Duty reconciled. He soon afterwards began his comedy of the Old Bachelor, which was the amusement of some leisure hours during a slow recovery from a fit of illness; yet was in itself so perfect, that Mr Dryden, on its being shown to him, declared he had never in his life seen such a first play. When brought on the stage in 1693, it met with such universal approbation that Mr Congreve, although he was but nineteen years old at the time when he wrote it, came to be considered as a prop of the declining stage, and a rising genius in dramatic poetry. The next year he produced the Double Dealer, which, for reasons which are not so obvious, did not meet with so much success as the former. The merit of his first play, however, had obtained him the favour and patronage of Lord Halifax, and some peculiar mark of distinction from Queen Mary; on whose death, which happened in the close of this year, he wrote a very elegant elegiac pastoral. In 1695, when Betterton opened the new house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Mr Congreve having joined him, produced his comedy of Love for Love, with which the company opened their campaign, and which met with such success that they immediately offered the author a share in the management of the house, on condition of his furnishing them with one play yearly. This offer he accepted; but whether through indolence, or from anxiety about correctness, which he looked upon as necessary to his works, his Mourning Bride did not appear till 1697, nor his Way of the World till two years afterwards. The indifferent success which this last-mentioned play, though an exceedingly good one, met with from the public, completed that disgust for the theatre which a long contest with Jeremy Collier, who had attacked the immoralities of the English stage, and more especially some of his pieces, had begun to produce, and he determined never more to write for the stage. However, though he quitted dramatic writing, he did not lay down the pen entirely, but occasionally wrote many little pieces both in prose and verse, all of which have been preserved as memorials of this celebrated dramatist. It is very possible, however, that he might not so soon have given way to this disgust, had not the easiness of his circumstances rendered any subservience to the opinions and caprice of the town absolutely unnecessary to him; for his abilities having very early in life raised him to the acquaintance of the Earl of Halifax, who was then the Mecaenas of the age, that nobleman, desirous of raising so promising a genius above the necessity of too hasty productions, made him one of the commissioners for licensing hackney coaches, or, according to Coxeter, a commissioner of the wine license. Lord Halifax also bestowed on him a place in the pipe office, and not long afterwards gave him a post in the customs worth L.600 per annum, while, in the year 1718, he was appointed secretary of Jamaica; so that his income, towards the latter part of his life, was upwards of L.1200 a year.

The greater part of the last twenty years of his life was spent in ease and retirement; and he either ceased, or affected not to give himself any trouble about reputation.
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Yet this conduct might in part proceed from a degree of pride; and T. Cibber, in his Lives of the Poets, relates the following anecdote of him: “When the celebrated Voltaire was in England, he waited upon Mr Cöngreve, and passed some compliments upon the merit and reputation of his works. Congreve thanked him, but at the same time told that ingenious foreigner, that he did not choose to be considered as an author, but only as a private gentleman, and in that light expected to be visited. Voltaire answered, that if he had never been any thing but a private gentleman, in all probability he had never been troubled with that visit.” He observes, in his own account of the transaction, that he was not a little disgusted with so unseasonable a piece of vanity.

Towards the close of his life he was much afflicted with gout; and, making a tour to Bath for the benefit of the waters, he was unfortunately overturned in his chariot, by which it is supposed he got some inward bruise, as he ever after complained of a pain in his side, and, on his return to London, continued gradually declining in his health, till the 19th of January 1729, when he died, at the age of fifty-seven. On the 26th of the same month, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, the pall being supported by persons of the first distinction.

“Congreve,” says Dr Johnson, “has merit of the highest kind. He is an original writer, who borrowed neither the models of his plot, nor the manner of his dialogue. He formed a peculiar idea of comic excellence, which he supposed to consist in gay remarks and unexpected answers; but that which he endeavoured, he seldom failed of performing. His scenes exhibit not much of humour, imagery, or passion; his personages are a kind of intellectual gladiators; every sentence is to ward or to strike; the contest of smartness is never intermitted; his wit is a meteor playing to and fro with alternate coruscations. His comedies have therefore, in some degree, the operation of tragedies; they surprise rather than divert, and raise admiration oftener than merriment. But they are the works of a mind replete with images, and quick in combination.” It may be added, that their licentiousness and immorality have been severely but justly censured. Of Congreve’s miscellaneous poetry nothing favourable can be said. His powers seem to desert him when he leaves the stage, and he becomes feeble, impotent, and dull, without elevation of fancy, selection of language, or skill in versification.

There is an elegant edition of his works, in three volumes 8vo, printed by Baskerville in 176L