SECTION IT., 1910, [3] Trans. R. S. C 
I.—A Rare Find in the Canadian Archives, 
Being a Tragedy entitled Liberty Asserted, by John Dennis; dedicated 
to Antony Henley. 
By Mrs. GeorGe Bryce, Member of Manitoba Historical 
Society. 
(Communicated by the President and read September 27, 1910.) 
The author of this drama, a copy of which is to be found in the 
Dominion Archives, John Dennis, was born in London, 1657, and died 
in the same city in 1734. 
He was educated at Harrow and in Caius College, Cambridge. He 
took his M.A. in Trinity Hall in 1683. He is said to have been dis- 
graced at college and deprived of a scholarship for having atiacked a 
fellow-student with a sword. 
After leaving Cambridge he had the advantage of travel in France 
and Italy, and on his return to England he was associated in fashion- 
able and literary circles with such men as the Earls of Pembroke and 
Mulgrave, Dryden, Congreve, Moyle, Wycherley, Southerne, Garth, ete. 
Dennis commenced literary work in 1692. Theophilus Cibber in 
his ‘“ Lives of Poets,” speaks of him as having written various poems 
“in the Pindaric way.” Dennis also wrote a number of dramas, the 
best known of which were, Rinaldo and Armide, Iphigenia, and the 
subject of this paper, Liberty Asserted. 
He, however, had his chief reputation among the literary men of 
his own day as a critic and indeed he has been estimated as such. down 
to the present time. In 1711 he published three letters on the genius 
and writings of Shakespeare, which include some of his best critical 
work. 
He antagonised two of the great writers of his day, Addison and 
Pope. His attack on Addison’s Cato gave rise to several severe articles 
and rejoinders in the Spectator. Johnson’s Life of Addison gives the 
salient points of Dennis’s criticism. 
Of the two great contemporaries, Dennis seems to have been most 
familiar personally with Pope. On one occasion when the latter paid 
a visit to Dennis in his room he found pinned on the walls many sheets 
of Addison’s Cato with epithets such as, “absurd,” “ preposterous,’ 
attached to them. 
In 1711, Dennis attacked Pope in “ Reflections Critical and Satiri- 
eal” upon a Rhapsody called “ Essay on Criticism.” Pope seems to 
have felt the onslaught keenly and after many years during which he 
