as he stated it, the
defence would be worth very little. For no man acquainted with human
nature could think that a sententious couplet would undo all the
mischief that five profligate acts had done. But it would have been wise
in Congreve to have looked again at his own comedies before he used this
argument. Collier did so, and found that the moral of the Old Bachelor,
the grave apophthegm which is to be a set-off against all the
libertinism of the piece, is contained in the following triplet:--

"What rugged ways attend the noon of life!
Our sun declines, and with what anxious strife,
What pain, we tug that galling load--a wife."

"Love for Love," says Collier, "may have a somewhat better farewell, but
it would do a man little service should he remember it to his dying
day:"--

"The miracle to-day is, that we find
A lover true, not that a woman's kind."

Collier's reply was severe and triumphant. One of his repartees we will
quote, not as a favorable specimen of his manner, but because it was
called forth by Congreve's characteristic affectation. The poet spoke of
the Old Bachelor as a trifle to which he attached no value, and which
had become public by a sort of accident. "I wrote it," he said, "to
amuse myself in a slow recovery from a fit of sickness." "What his
disease was," replied Collier, "I am not to inquire: but it must be a
very ill one to be worse than the remedy."

All that Congreve gained by coming forward on this occasion was that he
completely deprived himself of the excuse which he might with justice
have pleaded for his early offences. "Why," asked Collier, "should the
man laugh at the mischief of the boy, and make the disorders of his
nonage his own, by an after approbation?"

Congreve was not Collier's only opponent. Vanbrugh, Dennis, and Settle
took the field. And, from a passage in a contemporary satire, we are
inclined to think that among the answers to the Short View was one
written, or supposed to be written, by Wycherley. The victory remained
with Collier. A great and rapid reform in almost all the departments of
our lighter literature was the effect of his labors. A new race of wits
and poets arose, who generally treated with reverence the great ties
which bind society together, and whose very indecencies were decent when
compared with those of the school which flourished during the last forty
years of the seventeenth century.

This controversy probably prevented