These repeated attacks at length called down the vengeance of Dryden. who thus retorted upon him in the preface to the Fables:—­

“As for the City Bard, or Knight Physician, I hear his quarrel to me is, that I was the author of ‘Absalom and Achitophel,’ which he thinks, is a little hard on his fanatic patrons in London.

“But I will deal the more civilly with his two poems, because nothing ill is to be spoken of the dead; and, therefore, peace be to the manes of his ‘Arthurs.’  I will only say, that it was not for this noble knight that I drew the plan of an epic poem on King Arthur, in my preface to the translation of Juvenal.  The guardian angels of kingdoms were machines too ponderous for him to manage; and therefore he rejected them, as Dares did the whirl bats of Eryx, when they were thrown before him by Entellus:  yet from that preface, he plainly took his hint; for he began immediately upon the story, though he had the baseness not to acknowledge his benefactor, but, instead of it, to traduce me in a libel.”

Blackmore, who had perhaps thought the praise contained in his two last couplets ought to have allayed Dryden’s resentment, finding that they failed in producing this effect, very unhandsomely omitted them in his next edition, and received, as will presently be noticed, another flagellation, in the last verses Dryden ever wrote.

But a more formidable champion than Blackmore had arisen, to scourge the profligacy of the theatre.  This was no other than the celebrated Jeremy Collier, a nonjuring clergyman, who published, in 1698, “A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness 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.