The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) Volume III.

Step into the literary salon of the 1740s, where Theophilus Cibber serves as your witty and irreverent guide to the poets who shaped the English imagination. This third volume gathers biographical sketches of the era's most celebrated and scandalous verse-makers, from Sir John Denham, whose gambling debts nearly ruined him before 'Cooper's Hill' cemented his reputation, to the protean Thomas Killegrew, court wit and playwright to Charles II. But Cibber saves his most vivid pages for Aphra Behn, the trailblazing 'female wit' who daringly made literature her profession in an age when women were supposed to be silent. These are not dry chronologies but lived narratives: Cibber recounts debts, duels, affairs, and friendships; he quotes devastating verse and preserves anecdotes that would otherwise have been lost. Reading this compendium feels like overhearing Restoration wits debate their predecessors at a coffeehouse, a window into how an earlier generation understood its literary heritage, complete with the partiality, admiration, and occasional spite that true literary love entails.