But whatever objections may be made, either to his comick or tragick excellence, they are lost, at once, in the blaze of admiration, when it is remembered that he had produced these four plays before he had passed his twenty-fifth year; before other men, even such as are some time to shine in eminence, have passed their probation of literature, or presume to hope for any other notice than such as is bestowed on diligence and inquiry. Among all the efforts of early genius which literary history records, I doubt whether any one can be produced that more surpasses the common limits of nature than the plays of Congreve.
About this time began the long-continued controversy between Collier and the poets. In the reign of Charles the first the puritans had raised a violent clamour against the drama, which they considered as an entertainment not lawful to christians, an opinion held by them in common with the church of Rome; and Prynne published Histriomastix, a huge volume, in which stageplays were censured. The outrages and crimes of the puritans brought afterwards their whole system of doctrine into disrepute, and from the restoration the poets and the players were left at quiet; for to have molested them would have had the appearance of tendency to puritanical malignity.
This danger, however, was worn away by time; and Collier, a fierce and implacable nonjuror, knew that an attack upon the theatre would never make him suspected for a puritan; he, therefore, 1698, published a short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, I believe with no other motive than religious zeal and honest indignation. 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 sarcastick; 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 d'Urfey. His onset was violent: those passages, which while they stood single had passed with little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together, excited horrour; 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 publick charge.