. . ., 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 Durfey.  His onset was violent; those passages, which, while they stood single, had passed with little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together, excited horror.  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 public 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 art of controversy is to retort upon his adversary his own words: he is very angry, . . . Read More