Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/116

 cxii INTBODUCTION ���sort" knew a good play when they heard it, but the literary standards of her own day are, she thinks, much coarser and less critical. The Miser and the Poet is a humorous arraignment of the age for its failure to give poets due recognition, a subject cleverly worked up in Ardelia's Return Home. In the Critic and the Writer of Fables she gives delightful little burlesques of the popular literary forms, the pastoral, the heroic poem, and the fable. In the closing lines of this poem, operas and panegyrics are coupled as the two forms of literature most certain of pleas- ing. This fling at the Italian opera is but an early expres- sion of the critical attitude that found full statement in the Dunciad, and that contributed to the gusto with which The Beggar's Opera was received. Panegyric, though that was her own fertile vein, always awakened Ardelia's laughter. When she went to Apollo once for aid, his excuse for not loaning Pegasus was that this weary steed had been of late so spurred through thick and thin in panegyric, that he could no longer endure the bit a sarcastic reference, doubtless, since the poem was written in 1689, to the poeti- cal tributes incident to the revolution. In comedy Lady Winchilsea preferred Etheredge and Wycherley because they had more " sense and nature " than their successors a literary judgment enunciated, however, before Congreve had begun to write. In tragedy Dryden, Lee, and Otway, especially Otway, are her masters. It is a pity that Lady Winchilsea's critical remarks are so few, for they show con- siderable acumen and an unexpected cleverness in playfully sarcastic analysis. �Dr. Johnson calls The Splendid Shilling of Philips " a mode of writing new and unexpected," and it is probable Fanscomb ^ na ^ Philips's poem, which came out in 1701, �Barn gave Lady Winchilsea the hint for her Fans- �comb Barn, which, since this poem does not appear in either ��� �