Author: RYMER (Thomas):
Title: The Tragedies of the Last Age. Consider'd and Examin'd by the Practice of the Ancients and by the Common sense of all Ages. In a letter to Fleetwood Shepheard, Esq. The Second Edition.
Description: London: Printed and are to be sold by Richard Baldwin.., 1692. 8vo, 170 x 105 mms. pp. [xiv], 144, contemporary calf, borders in blind on covers, gilt ornament at base of spine; detaching front cover held in place by crude repair to front hinge, with the contemporary autograph "John Foley" on the title-page. Rymer sent John Dryden a copy of this work, and Dryden commented in one of his letters that it was "the best piece of Criticism in the English tongue; perhaps in any other of the modern … and think my selfe happy he has not fallen upon me, as severely and as wittily as he has upon Shakespeare and Fletcher." In his Lives of the Poets, Samuel Johnson made a crafty comment on the two critics: "It was said of a dispute between two mathematicians, 'malim cum Scaligero errare, quam cum Clavio recte sapere;' that 'it was more eligible to go wrong with one than right with the other.' A tendency of the same kind every mind must feel at the perusal of Dryden's prefaces and Rymer's discourses. With Dryden we are wandering in quest of Truth, whom we find, if we find her at all, drest in the graces of elegance; and if we miss her, the labour of the pursuit rewards itself: we are led only through fragrance and flowers. Rymer, without taking a nearer, takes a rougher way; every step is to be made through thorns and brambles, and Truth, if we meet her, appears repulisive by her mien and ungraceful by her habit. Dryden's criticism has the majesty of a queen; Rymers has the ferocity of a tyrant."

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