and disclaiming any intention to give offence, he then salvaged most of the play in a revision, Hampstead Heath (D.L.  Oct. 1705), with the scene changed to Hampstead.  It is as non-edifying as Tunbridge-Walks.  The note is struck on the first page, when Captain Smart, who has been trying to read a new comedy entitled Advice to All Parties, flings it down with expressions of ennui; shortly thereafter Deputy Driver, a member of a Reforming Society, appears on the scene to be twitted because while pretending to reform the whole world he can’t keep his own wife from gadding; and matters proceed with Smart’s project to trick a skittish independence-loving heiress into keeping a compact she had made to marry him, and his friend Bloom’s attempts at the cagey virtue of Mrs. Driver.  The latter project comes to nothing, but both hunter and hunted find pleasure in the chase while it lasts.  When Mrs. D. returns to the Deputy at the end, her motive for reassuming his yoke is a sound one—­ she’s out of funds; and her advice to him, “If you’d check my Rambling, loose my Reins,” is sound Wycherleyan sense.  It must be admitted that when one compares the dialogue of Hampstead Heath with that of the Act some punches are shown to have been pulled in the revision.[4] While keeping the play comic Baker still did not wish to push the audience too far.

In December, 1708 he made his fourth and (as it proved) final try for fame and fortune in the theatre with The fine Lady’s Airs, He claims that it was well received (see Dedication) and he had his third night, but D’Urfey, whose enmity Baker had incurred, says (Pref. to The Modern Prophets) that the play was “hist,” and The British Apollo, which carried on a feud with Baker in August and September of 1709, makes the same assertion in several places.[5] This, to be sure, is testimony from enemies.  But obviously the play was far less liked than Tunbridge-Walks had been, and thus (to compare a small man with a great one) Baker’s experience was something like Congreve’s, when, after the great success of Love for Love, The Way of the World won only a tepid reception.  And it is chiefly Congreve whom he takes for his model; the play is an attempt at a level of comedy higher than Baker had aimed at before.  He does not always succeed:  Congreve’s kind of writing was not natural to Baker, and the lines sometimes labor.  Still, the Bleinheim-Lady Rodomont duel has merit; and Sir Harry Sprightly (though of course he owes something to Farquhar’s Wildair), Mrs. Lovejoy, and Major Bramble are all in Baker’s best manner.  On the whole it was a better play than the audience in 1708 deserved.  Presumably Baker felt this, for he wrote no more for the stage.

Most of the account of Baker’s life pulled together in the DNB article on him has a decidedly apocryphal ring to it.  The statement (first made in The Poetical Register, 1719) that he was “Son of an Eminent Attorney of the City of London” sounds like something manufactured out of whole cloth by a compiler who in fact had no idea whose son Baker was.  The Biographia Dramatica had “heard” that the effeminate Maiden in Tunbridge-Walks