William Congreve
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830 ca.; "William Congreve" Northern Worthies; in Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century (1955) 681.
Wickedness is no subject for comedy; to forget this was Congreve's great error, and almost peculiar to him. The Dramatis Personae of Dryden, Wycherly, &c. are often vicious, obscene, &c., but not, like Congreve's wicked.