_Reprints_.

Baker's career in the theatre was as successful as should have been
expected by any young man who after his first play attempted to swim
against rather than with the current of taste. His first effort, entitled
_The Humour of the Age_, was produced at D.L. c. February 1701, and
published March 22,[2] the author having then but reached his "Twenty
First Year" (Dedication). It must have been well received, for Baker
speaks of "the extraordinary Reception this Rough Draught met with."
Indeed, it has in it, despite some "satire," a number of motifs which
would recommend it to the audience. Railton, the antimatrimonialist and
libertine of the piece, is given the wittiest lines, but his attempt to
seduce Tremilia, a grave Quaker-clad beauty, is frowned on by everyone,
including the author; and when the rake attempts to force the lady,
Freeman, a man of sense, intervenes with sword drawn and gives him a stern
lecture. In the end, when Tremilia, giving her hand to Freeman, turns out
to be an heiress who had assumed the Quaker garb to make sure of getting a
disinterested husband, the error of Railton's ways becomes apparent. At
the same time his cast mistress, whom he had succeeded in marrying off to
a ridiculous old Justice, is impressed by Tremilia's "great Example."
"How conspicuous a thing is Virtue!" says she, in an aside; and she
resolves to make the Justice a model wife. Despite much wit the play is
thus, in its main drift, exemplary.

Baker followed with _Tunbridge-Walks: Or, The Yeoman of Kent_, D.L. Jan.
1703, a play good enough to pass into the repertory and to be revived many
times in the course of the century. The variety of company and the holiday
atmosphere of the English watering-place had inspired good comedies of
intrigue, manners, and character eccentricities before this date (e.g.
Shadwell's _Epsom Wells_ and Rawlins' _Tunbridge-Wells_). Baker decorates