Sedley left Oxford as Etherege left Cambridge, ingloriously, bearing no honours with him. Unlike Sir George, however, he was a home-keeping youth, whereby his wit seems not to have suffered. He nursed the latter in the groves, or at the paternal hearth at Aylesford, in Kent, till the sun of the restored monarchy enticed him to London. There his wit recommended him to the King, won for him the hatred of small minds, and elicited the praise of noble spirits, who were witty themselves, and loved the manifestation of wit in others. "I have heard," says honest, brilliant, and much-abused Shadwell, "I have heard Sedley speak more wit at a supper than all my adversaries, putting their heads together, could _write_ in a year." This testimony was rendered by a man whose own reputation as a wit has the stamp and the warrant of Rochester.
Two more atrocious libertines than these two men were not to be found in the apartments at Whitehall, or in the streets, taverns, and dens of London. Yet both were famed for like external qualities. Etherege was easy and graceful, Sedley so refinedly seductive of manner that Buckingham called it "witchcraft," and Wilmot "his prevailing, gentle art." _I_, humbler witness, can only say, after studying their works and their lives, that Etherege was a more accomplished comedy-writer than Sedley, but that Sedley was a greater _beast_ than Etherege.
These two handsome fellows, made in God's image, marred their manly beauty by their licentiousness, and soon looked more like two battered, wine-soaked demons, than the sons of Christian mothers. Etherege, however, fierce and vindictive as he could be under passion, was never so utterly brutalised in mind as Sedley, nor so cruel in his humours at any time. If Sedley got up that groundless quarrel with Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, the alleged cause of which was some painted hussey, it was doubtless out of the very ferocity of his fun, which he thought well spent on exhibiting the prelate as sharing in the vices common at court.
Etherege, perhaps, had the stronger head of the two; he, at all events, kept it sufficiently free to be able to represent his King on more than one small diplomatic mission abroad. Sedley, who was nevertheless the longer liver of the two, indulged in excesses which, from their inexpressible infamy, betray a sort of insanity. When he, with other blackguards of good blood, was brought to trial for public outrages, which disgusted even the hideous wretches that lurked about Covent Garden, Chief Justice Foster addressed him from the bench with a "Sirrah!" and told him, while the reminiscence of the plague and the smoke of the Great Fire still hung over the court, that it was such wretches as he that brought God's wrath so heavily upon the kingdom. But neither the heavy fine of 2000 marks, nor his imprisonment, nor his being bound over to keep the peace for three years, nor his own conscience, nor the rebuke of wise men, could restrain this miscreant. He was not yet free from his bond[52] when he, and Buckhurst and others were carried off to the watch-house by the night-constables for fighting in the streets, drunk, as was their custom, and as naked as their drawn swords. On this occasion, in 1668, the King interfered in their favour, and Chief Justice Keeling, senile betrayer of his trust, let them go scatheless; but he punished the constables by whom they had been arrested!