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264 play the Fool by the force of Instinct.—O here come my pair of Turtles—What, billing so sweetly! Is not Valentine's Day over with you yet?"

I have selected this passage for the perfect management of transitions, for the mastery of phrase, and for the perfect use of rhythm and alliteration; but I doubt if I could find a better one to illustrate the real basis of thought, or, as we should perhaps say nowadays, of psychological observation, that after all sets Congreve's comedies apart from those of his contemporaries, not excepting even Wycherley. The oppositions of Motion and Method, of Reason and Instinct, though embodied in comic play, are not there by chance; and for their date they strike a strangely modern note, a note that sounds again and again as we read through these plays, making Congreve significant to our own generation in a sense only shared by Donne among the English writers of the Seventeenth Century.