Born, at Stow Qui (or Quire), Cambridgeshire, 23 Sept. 1650. Educated at his father’s school at Ipswich. To Caius Coll., Cambridge, as “poor scholar,” 10 April 1669; B.A., 1672; M.A., 1676. Ordained Deacon, 24 Sept. 1676; Priest, 24 Feb. 1677. Chaplain to Dowager Countess of Dorset at Knowle, 1677–79. Rector of Ampton, Suffolk, 25 Sept. 1679 to 1685. Lecturer at Gray’s Inn, 1685 [or 1686?]. Took up definite position as non-juror. Imprisoned for three months in Newgate owing to political pamphlet, 1688. Another short imprisonment, Nov. 1692. Much controversial writing on political and religious topics. Attack on stage begun, 1698. Consecrated as nonjuring bishop, 1713. Religious controversy; and abortive attempt to form union with Eastern Church. Died, in London, 26 April 1726. Buried in churchyard of St. Pancras. Works: “The Difference between the Present and Future State of our Bodies,” 1686; “The Comparison between Giving and Receiving,” 1687; “The Office of a Chaplain” (anon.), 1688; “The Desertion discuss’d” (anon.), 1688; “Vindiciæ Juris Regni” (anon.), 1689; “Animadversions upon the Modern Explanation of … a king de facto” (anon.), 1689; “A Caution against Inconstancy” (anon.), 1690; “A Dialogue concerning the Times,” 1690; “To the Right Hon. the Lords and the Gentlemen,” 1690; “Dr. Sherlock’s Case” (anon.), 1691; “A Brief Essay concerning the Independency of Church Power” (anon.), 1692; “The Case of giving Bail,” 1692; “A Reply” (to remarks on preceding), 1693; “A Persuasive to Consideration tendered to the Royalists” (anon.), 1693; “Remarks upon the ‘London Gazette,’” 1693; “Miscellanies” (afterwards pt. i. of “Essays upon several Moral Subjects”), 1694; “A Defence of the Absolution,” 1696; “A further Vindication of the Absolution,” 1696; “A Reply to the Absolution of a Penitent,” 1696; “An Answer to the Animadversions” (on preceding; anon.), 1696; “The Case of the two Absolvers,” 1696; “Essays upon several Moral Subjects,” 1697; “A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage,” 1698; (2nd and 3rd edns. same year); “A Defence of the Short View,” 1699; “A Second Defence,” 1700; “The Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical, and Poetical Dictionary,” vol. i., 1701; vols. ii., iii., 1705; vol. iv., 1721; “A Letter to a Lady concerning the New Playhouse” (anon.), 1706; “A Further Vindication of the Short View,” 1708; “An Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain,” vol. i., 1708; vol. ii., 1714; “An Answer to some Exceptions” (to preceding), 1715; “Some Remarks on Dr. Kennet’s … Letters,” 1717; “Reasons for restoring some Prayers” (anon.), 1717; “A Defence of the Reasons” (anon.), 1718; “A Vindication of the Reasons and Defence” (anon.), pt. i., 1718; pt. ii., 1719; “A Further Defence” (anon.), 1720; “Essays” (collected), 1722; “Several Discourses upon Practical Subjects,” 1725; “God not the Author of Evil,” 1726. Collier translated: “Sleidan’s Commentaries,” bks. ix.–xii., 1689; Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations,” 1701; Gregory of Nazianzus “Upon the Maccabees,” 1716; and wrote prefaces to: translation of Cicero “De Finibus” by S. Parker, 1702; and “Human Souls naturally Immortal,” 1707. Life: by T. Lathbury, in 1852 edn. of “Ecclesiastical History.”

Personal

  I shall say the less of Mr. Collier, because in many things he has taxed me justly; and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance.

  He is well entitled to grateful and respectful mention; for to his eloquence and courage is to be chiefly ascribed the purification of our lighter literature from that foul taint which had been contracted during the Antipuritan reaction. He was, in the full force of words, a good man. He was also a man of eminent abilities, a great master of sarcasm, a great master of rhetoric. His reading, too, though undigested, was of immense extent. But his mind was narrow; his reasoning, even when he was so fortunate as to have a good cause to defend, was singularly futile and inconclusive; and his brain was almost turned by pride, not personal, but professional. In his view, a priest was the highest of human beings, except a bishop. Reverence and submission were due from the best and greatest of the laity to the least respectable of the clergy. However ridiculous a man in holy orders might make himself, it was impiety to laugh at him. So nervously sensitive indeed was Collier on this point that he thought it profane to throw any reflection even on the ministers of false religions. He laid it down as a rule that Muftis and Augurs ought always to be mentioned with respect. He blamed Dryden for sneering at the Hierophants of Apis. He praised Racine for giving dignity to the character of a priest of Baal. He praised Corneille for not bringing that learned and reverend divine Tiresias on the stage in the tragedy of Œdips. The omission, Collier owned, spoiled the dramatic effect of the piece; but the holy function was much too solemn to be played with. Nay, incredible as it may seem, he thought it improper in the laity to sneer even at Presbyterian preachers…. In parts Collier was the first man among the nonjurors.

View of the English Stage, 1698

  Being convinced that nothing has gone further in Debauching the Age than the Stage-Poets and Play-House; I thought I could not employ my Time better than in writing against them. These men, sure, take Virtue and Regularity for Great Enemies; why else is their disaffection so very remarkable? It must be said, they have made their attack with great Courage, and gained no very inconsiderable Advantage. But it seems, Lewdness without Atheism is but half their Business. Conscience might possibly recover, and Revenge be thought on; and therefore like Foot-Pads, they must not only Rob but Murther…. I confess I have no Ceremony for Debauchery. For to Complement Vice, is but one Remove from worshipping the Devil.

  It goes for current authority round the whole town that Mr. Dryden himself publicly declared [the “Short View”] unanswerable, and thanked Mr. Collier for the just correction he had given him; and that Mr. Congreve and some other great authors had made much the same declaration; which is all so notoriously false, so egregious a lie, that Mr. Dryden particularly always looked upon it as a pile of malice, ill-nature, and uncharitableness, and all drawn upon the rack of wit and invention.

  If I do not return him civilities in calling him names, it is because I am not very well versed in his nomenclatures…. I will only call him Mr. Collier, and that I will call him as often as I think he shall deserve it. The corruption of a rotten divine is the generation of our sour critic…. The greater part of those examples which [Mr. Collier] has produced are only demonstrations of his own impurity, they only savour of his utterance, and were sweet enough till tainted by his breath.

  He is too much given to horse-play in his raillery, and comes to battle like a dictator from the plough. I will not say “the zeal of God’s house has eaten him up;” but I am sure it has devoured some part of his good manners and civility. It might also be doubted, whether it was altogether zeal which prompted him to this rough manner of proceeding; perhaps, it became not one of his function to rake into the rubbish of ancient and modern plays: a divine might have employed his pains to better purpose, than in the nastiness of Plautus and Aristophanes, whose examples, as they excuse not me, so might be possibly supposed, that he read it them not without some pleasure. They who have written commentaries on those poets, or on Horace, Juvenal, and Martial, have explained some vices, which, without their interpretation, had been unknown to modern times. Neither has he judged impartially betwixt the former age and us.

  However just his charge against the authors that then wrote for it might be, I cannot but think his sentence against the stage itself is unequal; reformation he thinks too mild a treatment for it, and is therefore for laying his axe to the root of it…. Nevertheless, Mr. Collier’s book was upon the whole thought so laudable a work, that king William, soon after it was published, granted him a nolo prosequi, when he stood answerable to the law for his having absolved two criminals just before they were executed for high treason. And it must be farther granted, that his calling our dramatic writers to this strict account had a very wholesome effect upon those who wrote after this time.

  He was formed for a controvertist: with sufficient learning; with diction vehement and pointed, though often vulgar and incorrect; with unconquerable pertinacity; with wit in the highest degree keen and sarcastick; and with all those powers exalted and invigorated by just confidence in his cause. Thus qualified, and thus incited, he walked out to battle, and assailed at once most of the living writers, from Dryden to Durfey. His onset was violent; those passages, which, whilst they stood single, excited little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together, excited horror; the wise and the pious caught the alarm; and the nation wondered why it had so long suffered irreligion and licentiousness to be openly taught at the publick charge.

  It is no disgrace to the memory of this virtuous and well-meaning man, that, to use the lawyer’s phrase, he pleaded his cause too highly; summoned unnecessarily, to his aid the artillery with which the Christian fathers, had fulminated against the Heathen Drama; and, pushing his arguments to extremity, directed it as well against the use as the abuse of the stage. Those who attempted to reply to him, availed themselves, indeed, of the weak parts of his arguments; but upon the main points of impeachment, the poets stood self-convicted.

  In his “View of the English Stage,” frightened the poets, and did all he could to spoil the stage by pretending to reform it; that is, by making it an echo of the pulpit, instead of a reflection of the manners of the world…. It seems that the author would have been contented to be present at a comedy or a farce, like a Father Inquisitor, if there was to be an auto da fé at the end, to burn both the actors and the poet. This sour, nonjuring critic has a great horror and repugnance at poor human nature in nearly all its shapes, of the existence of which he appears only to be aware through the stage: and this he considers as the only exception to the practice of piety, and the performance of the whole duty of man; and seems fully convinced, that if this nuisance were abated, the whole world would be regulated according to the creed and the catechism.

  Collier’s famous “View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage” came out in March 1697–8—and it did not come before it was wanted—things had gotten to such a pitch that Ladies were afraid of venturing to a new play, till they were assured that they might do it, without risking an insult on their modesty—or if their curiosity was too strong for their patience, they generally came in masks…. Collier had great merit, but he frequently goes too far—he has such a bias on his mind that he sees Profaneness where there is none.

  There is hardly any book of that time from which it would be possible to select specimens of writing so excellent and so various. To compare Collier with Pascal would indeed be absurd. Yet we hardly know where, except in the “Provincial Letters,” we can find mirth so harmoniously and becomingly blended with solemnity as in the “Short View.” In truth, all the modes of ridicule, from broad fun to polished and antithetical sarcasm, were at Collier’s command. On the other hand, he was complete master of the rhetoric of honest indignation. We scarcely know any volume which contains so many bursts of that peculiar eloquence which comes from the heart, and goes to the heart. Indeed, the spirit of the book is truly heroic. In order fairly to appreciate it, we must remember the situation in which the writer stood. He was under the frown of power. His name was already a mark for the invectives of one half the writers of the age; when, in the case of good taste, good sense, and good morals, he gave battle to the other half. Strong as his political prejudices were, he seems on this occasion to have entirely laid them aside. He has forgotten that he was a Jacobite, and remembers only that he is a citizen and a Christian. Some of his sharpest censures are directed against poetry which had been hailed with delight by the Tory party, and had inflicted a deep wound on the Whigs. It is really inspiriting to see how gallantly the solitary outlaw advances to attack enemies, formidable separately, and it might have been thought, irresistible when combined—distributes his swashing blows right and left among Wycherley, Congreve, and Vanbrugh—treads the wretched D’Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet—and strikes with all his strength full at the towering crest of Dryden.

  The force of much of Jeremy Collier’s invective, which was impaired neither by intemperance of language nor by any other symptom of inferior breeding, was irresistible; and although few literary manifestoes of the kind have been more abundantly answered, or answered by abler pens, the strength of his case was such that it may be said to have ensured him the victory at the outset.

  It would be foolish to attribute the influence exerted by the “Short View” to Collier’s ability alone. It owed its success in great measure to the fact that it chimed in with a wide-spread public sentiment.

  Jeremy Collier did infinite service to our Restoration Drama, but his was not the service of a scientific critic.

  The reader who expects to find Collier’s book a piece of ranting pharisaism, or full of the cant of a literary Tartuffe, will be disappointed. The treatment of the subject is severe, but reasonable; the tone is that of a man of the world. Collier—who afterwards, it is only fair to admit, lost his temper and wrote like a fanatic—remains, in the “Short View,” temperate and even gay. He has no objection to poetry in general, or even, theoretically, to drama…. Is certainly the brightest prose pamphlet of its time, when he records his impression of its vivacity, variety, and glow…. The sensation which it caused was unparalleled. No purely literary event—not even the publication of “Absolom and Architophel,” which was not purely literary—had awakened anything like so great an excitement since the Restoration. The books sold like wild-fire, and it may be interesting to note, from more than one source, that Collier was paid £50 for the first edition. For the next twelve months the town was convulsed with pamphleteers attacking and defending the “Short View,” sometimes in books longer than the original. In 1699 the controversy began to slacken, but the fire of answering pamphlets went sullenly on for many years, nor can be properly said to have closed until William Law brought the whole controversy to a climax, in 1726, with his “Absolute Unlawfulness of the Stage Entertainment fully demonstrated.”

  As the adversary of men of wit and genius, Collier has become obnoxious to their representatives, and has been unfairly reviled as a sour fanatic. In fact he is very moderate, admits that the stage may be a valuable medium of instruction, and only denounces its abuse…. His wit is as unquestionable as his zeal, but his argument is not everywhere equally cogent. On the chapter of profaneness he is fantastic and straitlaced, and so tender of dignities that he will not allow even the god Apis to be disrespectfully mentioned. On that of immorality he is unanswerable, and unless the incriminated dramatists were prepared to say, “Evil, be thou my good,” they could but own

  Collier, academic or nothing, is also as full of familiar contractions and cant phrase, as little regardful of formal and scholastic graces, as any gutter-scribbler of the time.

Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, 1708–14

  There appeared to me quite through the second volume, such a constant inclination to favour the popish doctrine, and to censure the reformers, that I should have had a better opinion of the author’s integrity, if he had professed himself to be not of our communion, nor of the communion of any other protestant church.

  I said, that Mr. Collier’s “History” was very well done, and that he was a clear-headed man. He writes without records, says the master, and does not understand them, whereas Dr. Kennett is a master in these things. I said, that there was no comparison between Dr. Kennett and Mr. Collier, the latter being much superior to him in learning and judgment; and as to his “History,” I said it was compiled from records and the best authorities.

  It is a work of great learning, the first of its kind that had appeared, save Fuller’s “Church History,” and in spite of the advance of historical scholarship, it has not lost its value.

General

  His labours were always well meant; and, it is certain that, as a censor, he did much good. The learned and the pious of Europe bore witness to his merit as a writer; and his contemporaries and posterity unite in commending him as an excellent Christian, who sacrificed every thing to that which he thought his duty.

  The name of Collier, a worthy, truly honourable man, who suffered for his conscience, deserves higher reputation than it has received.