eness of the Stage." His qualities as a
reformer are described by Dr. Johnson in language never to be amended.
"He was formed for a controvertist; with sufficient learning; with
diction vehement and pointed, though often vulgar and incorrect; with
unconquerable pertinacity; with wit in the highest degree keen and
sarcastic; and with all those powers exalted and invigorated by the just
confidence in his cause.

"Thus qualified, and thus incited, he walked out to battle, and assailed
at once most of the living writers, from Dryden to Durfey. His onset was
violent: those passages, which while they stood single, had passed with
little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together caught
the alarm, and the nation wondered why it had so long suffered
irreligion and licentiousness charge."

Notwithstanding the justice of this description, there is a strange
mixture of sense and nonsense in Collier's celebrated treatise. Not
contented with resting his objections to dramatic immorality and
religion, Jeremy labours to confute the poets of the 17th century, by
drawing them into comparison with Plautus and Aristophanes, which is
certainly judging of one crooked line by another. Neither does he omit,
like his predecessor Prynne, to marshal against the British stage those
fulminations directed by the fathers of the Church against the Pagan
theatres; although Collier could not but know, that it was the
performance of the heathen ritual, and not merely the action of the
drama, which rendered it sinful for the early Christians to attend the
theatre. The book was, however, of great service to dramatic poetry,
which, from that time, was less degraded by licence and indelicacy.

Dryden, it may be believed, had, as his comedies well deserved, a
liberal share of the general censure; but, however he might have felt
the smart of Collier's severity, he had the magnanimity to acknowledge
its justice. In the preface to the Fables, he makes the _amende
honorable._ "I shall say the less of Mr. Collier, because in many things
he has taxed me justly; and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and
expressions of mine, which can be truly argued of obscenity,
profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let him
triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to
be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance. It becomes me not to
draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it