" What," says Witwoud at the close of The Way of the
World, " are you all got together, like players at the
end of the last act ? " The players are, in fact, always
got together, and the final direction is " Exeunt
Omnes." Congreve, to be sure, made some pretence
to concern for the logical nexus of his plot. In his
Epistle Dedicatory to The Double Dealer, he asserts
that " the mechanical part of it is regular. I made the
plot as strong as I could because it was single, and I
made it single because I would avoid confusion, and
was resolved to preserve the three unities of the
drama." But in practice Congreve's notion of ortho-
doxy was rather like that put into the mouth of one of
his personages — " Orthodox is Greek for claret." Who
cares about what is going to happen next in The Way
of the World} Each scene of raillery between

' Letters of Jane Austen, ed. Lord Braboume (1884], vol. ii. p. 147.
