What Noise and Discord sordid Interest breeds!
Oh! that I had shar'd a levell'd State of Life,
With quiet humble Maids, exempt from Pride,
And Thoughts of Worldly Dross that marr their Joys,
In Any Sphere, but a Distinguished Heiress,
To raise me Envy, and oppose my Love.
Fortune, Fortune, Why did you give me Wealth to make me wretched!
Hillaria comes in:
Belinda in Tears—Now has that old Rogue been Plaguing her—Poor Soul!…
Come, Child, Let's retire, and take a Chiriping Dram, Sorrow's dry; I'le
divert you with the New Lampoon, 'tis a little Smutty; but what then; we
Women love to read those things in private. (Exeunt)
Within a year Baker had another play ready—An Act at Oxford, with the scene laid in the university town and some of the characters Oxford types. Whether through objections by the University authorities or not (they would perhaps have thought themselves justified in bringing pressure, for Baker certainly does not treat his alma mater with great respect) the play in this form was not acted. Baker published it in 1704, in the Dedication referring to "the most perfect Enjoyment of Life, I found at Oxford" and disclaiming any intention to give offence, he then salvaged most of the play in a revision, Hampstead Heath (D.L. Oct. 1705), with the scene changed to Hampstead. It is as non-edifying as Tunbridge-Walks. The note is struck on the first page, when Captain Smart, who has been trying to read a new comedy entitled Advice to All Parties, flings it down with expressions of ennui; shortly thereafter Deputy Driver, a member of a Reforming Society, appears on the scene to be twitted because while pretending to reform the whole world he can't keep his own wife from gadding; and matters proceed with Smart's project to trick a skittish independence-loving heiress into keeping a compact she had made to marry him, and his friend Bloom's attempts at the cagey virtue of Mrs. Driver. The latter project comes to nothing, but both hunter and hunted find pleasure in the chase while it lasts. When Mrs. D. returns to the Deputy at the end, her motive for reassuming his yoke is a sound one— she's out of funds; and her advice to him, "If you'd check my Rambling, loose my Reins," is sound Wycherleyan sense. It must be admitted that when one compares the dialogue of Hampstead Heath with that of the Act some punches are shown to have been pulled in the revision.[4] While keeping the play comic Baker still did not wish to push the audience too far.
In December, 1708 he made his fourth and (as it proved) final try for fame and fortune in the theatre with The fine Lady's Airs, He claims that it was well received (see Dedication) and he had his third night, but D'Urfey, whose enmity Baker had incurred, says (Pref. to The Modern Prophets) that the play was "hist," and The British Apollo, which carried on a feud with Baker in August and September of 1709, makes the same assertion in several places.[5] This, to be sure, is testimony from enemies. But obviously the play was far less liked than Tunbridge-Walks had been, and thus (to compare a small man with a great one) Baker's experience was something like Congreve's, when, after the great success of Love for Love, The Way of the World won only a tepid reception. And it is chiefly Congreve whom he takes for his model; the play is an attempt at a level of comedy higher than Baker had aimed at before. He does not always succeed: Congreve's kind of writing was not natural to Baker, and the lines sometimes labor. Still, the Bleinheim-Lady Rodomont duel has merit; and Sir Harry Sprightly (though of course he owes something to Farquhar's Wildair), Mrs. Lovejoy, and Major Bramble are all in Baker's best manner. On the whole it was a better play than the audience in 1708 deserved. Presumably Baker felt this, for he wrote no more for the stage.
Most of the account of Baker's life pulled together in the DNB article on him has a decidedly apocryphal ring to it. The statement (first made in The Poetical Register, 1719) that he was "Son of an Eminent Attorney of the City of London" sounds like something manufactured out of whole cloth by a compiler who in fact had no idea whose son Baker was. The Biographia Dramatica had "heard" that the effeminate Maiden in Tunbridge-Walks
was absolutely, and without exaggeration, a portrait of the author's own former character, whose understanding having at length pointed out to him the folly he had so long been guilty-of, he reformed it altogether … and wrote this character, in order to … warn others from that rock of contempt, which he had himself for some time been wrecked on.
Nothing on its face more improbable than this could well be imagined. And that Baker could have "died … of that loathsome Distemper the Morbus Pediculosus" (sketch of him in Scanderbeg, 1747) does not sound likely, either.[6]
A lead to more solid information is furnished by the circumstance of Baker's having been educated at Oxford. We have seen (above) that he was barely twenty-one when The Humour of the Age was printed in March of 1701. A Thomas Baker, son of John Baker of Ledbury, Hereford, was entered at Brasenose College, Oxford, on March 18, 1697, aged seventeen.[7] The ages falling so pat, this must be our dramatist. Upon taking his B.A. at Christ Church in 1700 he must immediately have set to scribbling his first play (the Dedication says that it was "writ in two months last summer"). Perhaps at this time he lived in London in some such boarding-house as furnishes the scene for the play.
He may have been already studying law, for at least by 1709 (we cannot tell how much earlier) he was "by trade an Attorney."[8] It seems likely that various touches in the comedies reflect his training for this calling. In The Humour of the Age, Pun and Quibble, the principal fops, are a pair of articled law-clerks who detest green-bags and (it comes out at one point) are collaborating on a play. (Readers of the present reprint will note, also, that the money which Master Totty brings with him from the country is to recompense an attorney for training him in law). Perhaps Baker could never afford to study law as those well off did: there may be a tinge of sour grapes in the observation in Tunbridge-Walks that "since the Lawyers are all turn'd Poets, and have taken the Garrets in Drury Lane, none but Beaus live in the Temple now, who have sold all their Books, burnt all their Writings, and furnish'd the Rooms with Looking-glass and China." But this is light-hearted, as becomes a man who has not yet had a setback as a stage-poet. Two years later, after the stopping of An Act at Oxford had put him to much trouble, he is souring somewhat, for the poor Oxford scholar says in Hampstead Heath that no profession nowadays offers much prospect of success for a man trained as he, and, as for poetry, one can only expect to be "two years writing a Play, and sollicit three more to get it acted; and for present Sustenance one's forc'd to scribble The Diverting Post, A Dialogue between Charing-Cross and Bow Steeple, and Elegies upon People that are hang'd."