m the restoration the poets and the players were left
at quiet; for to have molested them would have had the appearance of
tendency to puritanical malignity.

This danger, however, was worn away by time; and Collier, a fierce and
implacable nonjuror, knew that an attack upon the theatre would never
make him suspected for a puritan; he, therefore, 1698, published a short
View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, I believe
with no other motive than religious zeal and honest indignation. 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
sarcastick; and with all those powers exalted and invigorated by 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 d'Urfey. His onset
was violent: those passages, which while they stood single had passed
with little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together,
excited horrour; the wise and the pious caught the alarm; and the nation
wondered why it had so long suffered irreligion and licentiousness to be
openly taught at the publick charge.

Nothing now remained for the poets but to resist or fly. Dryden's
conscience, or his prudence, angry as he was, withheld him from the
conflict; Congreve and Vanbrugh attempted answers. Congreve, a very
young man, elated with success, and impatient of censure, assumed an air
of confidence and security. His chief artifice of controversy is to
retort upon his adversary his own words: he is very angry, and, hoping
to conquer Collier with his own weapons, allows himself in the use of
every term of contumely and contempt; but he has the sword without the
arm of Scanderbeg; he has his antagonist's coarseness, but not his
strength. Collier replied; for contest was his delight: he was not to be
frighted from his purpose or his prey.

The cause of Congreve was not tenable: whatever glosses he might use for
the defence or palliation of single passages, the general tenour and
tendency of his plays must always be condemned. It is acknowledged, with
universal conviction, that the perusal of his works will make no man
better; and that their ultimate effect is to represent pleasure in
alliance with vice, and to relax those obligations by which life ought
to be regulated.

The s