racter, whose understanding having at length pointed
out to him the folly he had so long been guilty-of, he reformed it
altogether ... and wrote this character, in order to ... warn others
from that rock of contempt, which he had himself for some time been
wrecked on.

Nothing on its face more improbable than this could well be imagined.
And that Baker could have "died ... of that loathsome Distemper the
_Morbus Pediculosus_" (sketch of him in _Scanderbeg,_ 1747) does not sound
likely, either.[6]

A lead to more solid information is furnished by the circumstance of
Baker's having been educated at Oxford. We have seen (above) that he was
barely twenty-one when _The Humour of the Age_ was printed in March of
1701. A Thomas Baker, son of John Baker of Ledbury, Hereford, was entered
at Brasenose College, Oxford, on March 18, 1697, aged seventeen.[7] The
ages falling so pat, this must be our dramatist. Upon taking his B.A. at
Christ Church in 1700 he must immediately have set to scribbling his first
play (the Dedication says that it was "writ in two months last summer").
Perhaps at this time he lived in London in some such boarding-house as
furnishes the scene for the play.

He may have been already studying law, for at least by 1709 (we cannot
tell how much earlier) he was "by trade an Attorney."[8] It seems likely
that various touches in the comedies reflect his training for this
calling. In _The Humour of the Age_, Pun and Quibble, the principal fops,
are a pair of articled law-clerks who detest green-bags and (it comes
out at one point) are collaborating on a play. (Readers of the present
reprint will note, also, that the money which Master Totty brings with him
from the country is to recompense an attorney for training him in law).
Perhaps Baker could never afford to study law as those well off did: there
may be a tinge of sour grapes in the observation in _Tunbridge-Walks_ that
"since the Lawyers are all turn'd Poets, and have taken the Garrets in
Drury Lane, none but Beaus live in the Temple now, who have sold all
their Books, burnt all their Writings, and furnish'd the Rooms with
Looking-glass and China." But this is light-hearted, as becomes a man who
has not yet had a setback as a stage-poet. Two years later, after the
stopping of _An Act at Oxford_ had put him to much trouble, he is souring
somewhat, for the poor Oxford scholar says in _Hampstead Heath_ that no
profession nowadays offers much pro