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Fifty years ago Edmund Gosse observed: “We should know little or nothing of what happened to Congreve between 1700 and 1710 if it were not for the Keally letters.” The further statement must be made that in over two hundred years little or nothing has been discovered concerning the friend to whom those letters were addressed. Gosse knew only that Joseph Keally was of “Keally Mount, Kilkenny” and that he was “a relative of Bishop Berkeley.” Congreve's recent biographer, Mr. D. Crane Taylor, unaware of Keally's early death, deplores the “most regrettable” loss of letters later in date than those of Berkeley's Relics but concludes that Congreve and Keally “unquestionably remained close friends.”

In a recent article on “The Sources of the Restoration Heroic Play,” Mr. William S. Clark discusses Elizabethan and French influences on heroic drama and supports the claim made by Sir Walter Scott, a century ago, that the heroic plays must be regarded as “the legitimate offspring” of the French heroic romances. Concerning the English influence, Mr. Clark observes: “In the face of this extensive dependence upon French suggestions the resemblances between the heroic plays and the English drama of earlier periods come to have much less significance.” Indeed, he regards as erroneous the opinion of scholars who have maintained that earlier English drama influenced “to a large degree” the heroic drama of the Restoration.

Among the shadowy figures that make up the circle of Congreve's most intimate friends, Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, seems to have suffered most from the gossip of her own age and from the more detached but still biassed estimates of later critics. Not one of her contemporaries spoke a really decisive word in her favor; and the biographers of Congreve have preferred to dismiss her as an amusing eccentric. But one critic, Leigh Hunt, has cared to linger over this minor portrait, commenting on “the slow yet sensitive mind” of the Duchess and concluding that she loved Congreve “with all the heart she had, and a great deal of obstinacy.”