Wycherley's efforts to bring to the Duke of Buckingham's notice the case of Samuel Butler shows that the writer of even such plays as The Country Wife may have generous impulses, while his defence of Buckingham, when the duke in his turn fell into trouble, show that the inventor of so shameless a fraud as that which forms the pivot of The Plain Dealer may in actual life possess that passion for fair play which is seldom believed to be an English quality. But among the "ninety-nine" religions with which Voltaire accredited England there is one whose permanency has never been shaken — the worship of gentility. To this Wycherley remained as faithful to the day of his death as Congreve himself. And, if his relations to that "other world beyond this", which the Puritans had adopted, were liable to change with his environments, it was because that "other world" was really out of fashion altogether.
