Page:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu/892

Rh was known perhaps even to palaeolithic man) the promiscuous intercourse of the beasts of the field. Yet Collier leaves Wycherley unassailed, and classes Vanbrugh and Congreve with Shakespeare.

It was after the success of The Plain Dealer that the turning-point came in Wycherley's career. The great dream of all the men about town in Charles's time, as Wycherley's plays all show, was to marry a widow, young and handsome, a peer's daughter if possible—but in any event rich, and spend her money upon wine and women. While talking to a friend in a bookseller's shop at Tunbridge, Wycherley heard The Plain Dealer asked for by a lady who, in the person of the countess of Drogheda, answered all the requirements. An introduction ensued, then love-making, then marriage—a secret marriage, probably in 1680, for, fearing to lose the king's patronage and the income therefrom, Wycherley still thought it politic to pass as a bachelor. He had not seen enough of life to learn that in the long run nothing is politic but “straightforwardness.” Whether because his countenance wore a pensive and subdued expression, suggestive of a poet who had married a dowager countess and awakened to the situation, or whether because treacherous confidants divulged his secret, does not appear, but the news of his marriage oozed out—it reached the royal ears, and deeply wounded the father anxious about the education of his son. Wycherley lost the appointment that was so nearly within his grasp—lost indeed the royal favour for ever. He never had an opportunity of regaining it, for the countess seems to have really loved him, and Love in a Wood had proclaimed the writer to be the kind of husband whose virtue prospers best when closely guarded at the domestic hearth. Wherever he went the countess followed him, and when she did allow him to meet his boon companions it was in a tavern in Bow Street opposite to his own house, and even there under certain protective conditions. In summer or in winter he was obliged to sit with the window open and the blinds up, so that his wife might see that the party included no member of a sex for which her husband's plays had advertised his partiality. She died, however, in the year after her marriage and left him the whole of her fortune. But the title to the property was disputed; the costs of the litigation were heavy—so heavy that his father was unable (or else he was unwilling) to come to his aid; and the result of his marrying the rich, beautiful and titled widow was that the poet was thrown into the Fleet prison. There he remained for seven years, being finally released by the liberality of James II.—a liberality which, incredible as it seems, is too well authenticated to be challenged. James had been so much gratified by seeing The Plain Dealer acted that, finding a parallel between Manly's “manliness” and his own, such as no spectator had before discovered, he paid off Wycherley's execution creditor and settled on him a pension of £200 a year. Other debts still troubled Wycherley, however, and he never was released from his embarrassments, not even after succeeding to a life estate in the family property. In coming to Wycherley's death, we come to the worst allegation that has ever been made against him as a man and as a gentleman. At the age of seventy-five he married a young girl, and is said to have done so in order to spite his nephew, the next in succession, knowing that he himself must shortly die and that the jointure would impoverish the estate.

Wycherley wrote verses, and, when quite an old man, prepared them for the press by the aid of Alexander Pope, then not much more than a boy. But, notwithstanding all Pope's tinkering, they remain contemptible. Pope's published correspondence with the dramatist was probably edited by him with a view to giving an impression of his own precocity. The friendship between the two cooled, according to Pope's account, because Wycherley took offence at the numerous corrections on his verses. It seems more likely that Wycherley discovered that Pope, while still professing friendship and admiration, satirized his friend in the Essay on Criticism. Wycherley died on the 1st of January 1716, and was buried in the vault of the church in Covent Garden.

 WYCLIFFE (or ), JOHN (c. 1320-1384), English reformer, was born, according to John Leland, our single authority on the point, at Ipreswel (evidently Hipswell), 1 m. from Richmond in Yorkshire. The date may have been somewhere about 1320. Leland elsewhere mentions that he “drew his origin” from Wycliffe-on-Tees (Collectanea, ii. 329), so that his lineage was of the ancient family which is celebrated by Scott in Marmion. The Wycliffes had a natural connexion with the college at Oxford which had been founded in the latter part of the previous century by their neighbours, the Balliols of Barnard Castle; and to Balliol College, then distinctively an “arts” college, John Wycliffe in due time proceeded. It has been generally believed, and was in fact believed not many years after his death, that he was a fellow of Merton College in 1356; but this identification probably rests on a confusion with a contemporary. That the future reformer was a fellow of Balliol is implied in the fact that some time after 1356, but before the summer of 1360, he was elected master. This office he held but a short time. So soon as 1361 he accepted a college living, that of Fillingham in Lincolnshire, and probably left Oxford for some time. In the same year the name of a certain “John de Wyclif of the diocese of York, M.A.” appears as a suppliant to the Roman Curia for a provision to a prebend, canonry and dignity at York (Cat. of Entries in the Papal Registries, ed. Bliss, Petitions, i. 390). This was not granted, but Wycliffe received instead the prebend of Aust in the collegiate church of Westbury-on-Trym. In 1365 one “John de Wyclif” was appointed by Simon Islip, archbishop of Canterbury, to the wardenship of Canterbury Hall, a house which the archbishop founded for a mixed body of monks and secular clergy, and then—as a result of the inevitable quarrels—filled exclusively with the latter. Two years later, however, Islip's successor, the monk Simon Langham, reversed the process, replacing the intruded seculars by monks. The dispossessed warden and fellows appealed to Rome, and in 1371 judgment was given against them. The question of the identity of the warden of Canterbury Hall with the reformer is still a matter of dispute. It has been understood as referred to by Wycliffe himself (De ecclesia, cap. xvi. pp. 370 sq.), and was assumed by the contemporary monk of St Albans (Chron. Angl. “Rolls” ser. p. 115) and by Wycliffe's opponent William Woodford (Fasc. Zizan. p. 517), who found in Wycliffe's resentment at this treatment the motive for his attacks on the religious orders; it has likewise been assumed by a series of modern scholars, including Loserth (Realencyklopädie, 1908 ed., vol. xxi. p. 228, § 35), who only denies the deductions that Woodford drew from it. Dr Rashdall, on the other hand, following Shirley, brings evidence to show that the Wycliffe of Canterbury Hall could not have been the reformer, but was the same person as the fellow of Merton, this being the strongest argument against the identification of the latter with the reformer. The confusion is increased by the appearance of yet another “John Wyclif” or “Wiclif” on the