'What plays! What wit!' Byron's tribute to Congreve was a fitting one: the consummate mastery of language, wonderfully absurd comic characters, and especially the exquisite wit and gaiety of the lovers' exchanges, mark his plays as some of the greatest comedies in the English language. But if Congreve represents the flowering of Restoration comedy, he also stands apart from his fellow playwrights; contrasted with Etherege's amorality and Wycherley's wit, his 'sound and capacious mind' invests his incomparable plays with an underlying maturity and intellectual fastidiousness; he mocks the standards of his age in the guise of indulging its tastes.

Bonamy Dobrée (1891-1974) was a Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds, and an authority on the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries.