John Dennis (dramatist)

[3] After travelling in France and Italy, he settled in London, where he became acquainted with Dryden, and close to Wycherley, Congreve and the leading literary figures of his day; and being made temporarily independent by inheriting a small fortune, he devoted himself to literature.

One of his tragedies, a violent attack on the French in harmony with popular prejudice, entitled Liberty Asserted, was produced with great success at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1704.

After taking the Grand Tour of the Alps he published his comments in a journal letter published as Miscellanies in 1693, giving an account of crossing the Alps where, contrary to his prior feelings for the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason", the experience of the journey was at once a "pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear", but "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair."

The significance of his account is that the concept of the sublime, at the time a rhetoric term primarily relevant to literary criticism, was used to describe a positive appreciation for horror and terror in aesthetic experience, in contrast to Ashley Cooper, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury's more timid response to the sublime.

Dennis' forensic skills as a critic enabled him to critique the flaws in the far younger poet's observations, intended to show "that as there is a great deal of venom in this little gentleman's temper, nature has very wisely corrected it with a great deal of dullness … as there is no creature in nature so venomous, there is nothing so stupid and so impotent as a hunch-back'd toad; and a man must be very quiet and very passive, and stand still to let him fasten his teeth and his claws, or to be supriz'd sleeping by him, before that animal can have any power to hurt him.

[4] Dennis had fallen out with Addison in April 1711, over an essay that contained a good-humoured rejection of the notion of poetic justice in The Spectator, No.

The apocryphal tale regarding his petitioning the Duke of Marlborough to have a special clause inserted in the Treaty of Utrecht to secure him from French vengeance, if true, suggests growing paranoia.

[7] For a contemporary account of Dennis see Theophilus Cibber's Lives of the Poets, Volume 4; for a nineteenth-century view see Isaac Disraeli's essays on Pope and Addison in the Quarrels of Authors, and On the Influence of a Bad Temper in Criticism in Calamities of Authors;[4] for a contemporary account see the Preface and Introduction to Edward Niles Hooker's The Critical Works of John Dennis.