" Of the morals of the play he has not a
word, nor do I believe that he was conscious of any harm in them till he
was attacked by Collier, and then, (with some protest against what he
considers the undue severity of his censor) he had the manliness to
confess that he had done wrong. "It becomes me not to draw my pen in the
defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good
one."[46] And in a letter to his correspondent, Mrs. Thomas, written only
a few weeks before his death, warning her against the example of Mrs.
Behn, he says, with remorseful sincerity: "I confess I am the last man in
the world who ought in justice to arraign her, who have been myself too
much a libertine in most of my poems, which I should be well contented I
had time either to purge or to see them fairly burned." Congreve was less
patient, and even Dryden, in the last epilogue he ever wrote, attempts an
excuse:--
"Perhaps the Parson stretched a point too far,
When with our Theatres he waged a war;
He tells you that this very moral age
Received the first infection from the Stage,
But sure a banished Court, with lewdness fraught,
The seeds of open vice returning brought.
* * * * *
Whitehall the naked Venus first revealed,
Who, standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine,
The strumpet was adored with rites divine.
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