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