His industrious advocacy of newly-adopted opinions was soon cut short by the flight of his Papist patron, King James, and the triumph of Protestantism in the accession of William and Mary. The laurel was stripped from his brow, and placed on that of his antagonist, Shadwell. We find him, therefore, again poor, and though not friendless, with many powerful enemies, and once more compelled to have recourse to the stage, which he so hated, to compensate the loss of income inflicted on him by "the glorious Revolution." In the preface to "Don Sebastian," the play which he now wrote, and which was not, as he tells us, "huddled up in haste," but carefully elaborated, he describes himself as "an author whose misfortunes have once more brought him on the stage," and adds: "While I continue in these bad circumstances (and truly I see very little probability of coming out), I must still be obliged to write; and if I may still hope for the same kind usage, I shall the less repent of that hard necessity."
"Don Sebastian," perhaps, take it all in all, is his best drama. It was not at first very successful; but after some alterations and curtailments, became an established favourite.
"Amphitryon" was next played with great applause, the opera of "King Arthur" followed; "Cleomenes" was "coldly received;" and his last play, "Love Triumphant," was, like his first, a failure. And so he made his exit from the boards.
We now find him a veteran littérateur, helped by the bounty of some generous friends and patrons, employing his two sons, Congreve, Creech, Tate and others, to translate under his direction; and meanwhile, political and religious hostility to him softening by time, exercising a dictatorship over the literary republic. As our space has precluded us from giving more than incidental criticisms
