'But Appius reddens at each word you speak,
And stares tremendous, with a threatening eye,
Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry.'
It was perilous in Pope to allude to the personal defects of an antagonist, and Dennis attacked him coarsely in return as a 'young, squab, short gentleman, an eternal writer of amorous pastoral madrigals, and the very bow of the god of Love.' 'He has reason,' he adds, 'to thank the good gods that he was born a modern; for had he been born of Grecian parents, and his father by consequence had by law the absolute disposal of him, his life had been no longer than one of his poems—the life of half a day.'
Dennis's pamphlet on the Essay caused Pope some pain when he heard of it, 'But it was quite over,' he told Spence, 'as soon as I came to look into his book and found he was in such a passion.'
The critic, however, was a thorn in Pope's flesh for many a year, and the poet showed his irritation by assaulting him in prose and verse. Dennis was equally ready, although not equally capable of returning the poet's blows, and when free from the impotence of anger, made several shrewd critical thrusts which his antagonist felt keenly.
Dennis aspired to be a poet and dramatist. He wrote a bombastic poem in blank verse called The Monument, sacred to the immortal memory of 'the good, the great, the god-like, William III.'; a poem, also in blank verse, and still more 'tremendous,' to quote his favourite word, on the Battle of Blenheim, in which he frequently invokes his soul to say and sing a thousand things far beyond his soul's reach—and a poem equally laboured and grandiloquent, on the Battle of Ramillies, in which there are passages that read like a burlesque of Milton. Dennis observes in his Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704) that 'poetry unless it pleases, nay, and pleases to a height, is the most contemptible thing in the world.' This is just criticism, but the writer did not recognize that his own verse was contemptible. In this essay, which contains many sound critical remarks and an appreciation of Milton seldom felt at that time, he has the bad taste to quote as an illustration of the sublime, a passage from his own paraphrase of the Te Deum:
'Where'er at utmost stretch we cast our eyes
Through the vast frightful spaces of the skies,
Ev'n there we find Thy glory, there we gaze
On Thy bright Majesty's unbounded blaze;
Ten thousand suns prodigious globes of light
At once in broad dimensions strike our sight;
Millions behind, in the remoter skies,
Appear but spangles to our wearied eyes;
And when our wearied eyes want farther strength
To pierce the void's immeasurable length
Our vigorous towering thoughts still further fly,
And still remoter flaming worlds descry;
But even an Angel's comprehensive thought
Cannot extend so far as Thou hast wrought;
Our vast conceptions are by swelling, brought,
Swallowed and lost in Infinite, to nought.'
It is significant of Dennis's judgment of his own verse that these inflated lines follow one of the loveliest passages contained in Paradise Lost. Milton describes the moon unveiling her peerless light; and the poet-critic exhibits in juxtaposition his 'vigorous towering thoughts' about the stars. The comparison forced upon the reader is unfortunate.
His tragedies, Iphigenia (1704), Liberty Asserted (1704), Appius and Virginia (1709), and a comedy called A Plot and No Plot (1697) were brought upon the stage. Liberty Asserted, which was received with applause due to the violence of its attacks upon the French, although called a tragedy, does not end tragically. The heroine's patriotism is so fervid that she professes herself willing, while loving one man, to marry another whom she does not love, if her country deems him the more worthy.
Among other poetical attempts, Dennis addressed a Pindaric Ode to Dryden, and the great poet, with the flattery which he was always ready to lavish on his well-wishers, called him 'one of the greatest masters' in that kind of verse. 'You have the sublimity of sense as well as sound,' he wrote, 'and know how far the boldness of a poet may lawfully extend.'
It may be added that Dennis on one occasion successfully opposed one of the ablest controversialists of the age. In The Absolute Unlawfulness of Stage Entertainments fully demonstrated, William Law attacked dramatic representations, not on account of the evils at that time associated with them, but as 'in their own nature grossly sinful.' 'To suppose an innocent play,' Law says, 'is like supposing innocent lust, sober rant, or harmless profaneness,' and throughout the pamphlet this strain of fierce hostility is maintained.