Lee, Otway, and Tate were sons of clergymen. Little Crowne's father was an Independent minister in Nova Scotia, and Crowne himself laid claim, fruitlessly, to a vast portion of the territory there--unjustly made over by the English Government to the French. Cibber was an artist, on the side of his father the statuary, and a "gentleman" by his mother.
It may be said of a good number of these gentlemen that idleness and love of pleasure made them dramatic poets. Shadwell, Ravenscroft, Wycherley, Durfey, Bankes, Southerne, Congreve, and Rowe, were all apprenticed to the law; but the study was one too dull for men of their vivacious temperament, and they all turned from it in disgust. According to their success, so were they praised or blamed.
The least successful dramatists on the above list were the most presumptuous of critics. Rymer, who was wise enough to stick to the law while he endeavoured to turn at least Melpomene to good account, tried to persuade the public that Shakspeare was even of less merit than it was the fashion to assign to him. In 1678,[62] Rymer boldly asserted that "in the neighing of a horse as the growling of a mastiff, there is a meaning; there is as lively expression and, may I say, more humanity than many times in the tragical flights of Shakspeare." He says, that "no woman bred out of a pigstye could talk so meanly as Desdemona," in that tragedy which Rymer calls "a bloody farce without salt or savour." Of Brutus and Cæsar, he says Shakspeare has depicted them as "Jack Puddins." To show how much better he understood the art, Rymer published, in 1678, the tragedy he could not get represented, "Edgar, or the English Monarch." He professes to imitate the ancients, and his tragedy is in rhyme; he accuses Shakspeare of anachronisms, and his Saxon princess is directed to "pull off her patches!" The author was ambitious enough to attempt to supersede Shakspeare, and he pooh-poohed John Milton by speaking of _Paradise Lost_ as "a thing which some people were pleased to call a poem."
Dennis was not quite so audacious as this. He was a better critic than the author of the _Foedera_, and a more voluminous writer, or rather adapter, of dramatic pieces. He spoke, however, of Tasso as compassionately as the village-painter did of Titian; but his usefulness was acknowledged by the commentator, who remarked that men might construct good plays by following his precepts and avoiding his examples. Boyer has said something similar of Gildon, who was a critic as well as dramatist--namely, "he wrote an _English Art of Poetry_, which he had practised himself very unsuccessfully in his dramatic performances."