dull, my humour saturnine and reserved. So that those who decry my comedies do me no injury except it be in point of profit; reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend.") He had indeed no humour; he had no grace; he had no eye for those finer improprieties of character and conduct which are to comedy what passion is to tragedy. What wit he had was coarse and serious; he had no power of inventing ludicrous incidents; he could not manage the light artillery of colloquial raillery. In his next play, The Rival Ladies (printed in 1664), he exchanged in the lighter parts plain prose for blank verse, and he wrote the tragic portions in highly elaborate rhyming couplets, prefixing to it, in the form of a dedicatory Epistle to the Earl of Orrery, the first of those delightful critical prefaces which form one of the most valuable and pleasing portions of his writings. The Rival Ladies was well received, and he hastened to assist his friend and brotherin-law, Sir Robert Howard, in the composition of The Indian Queen (January, 1664). This was a great success. It probably revealed to Dryden where his real strength lay. The drama belonged to those curious exotics known as the Heroic Plays. Of these plays, of their origin and character, Dryden has himself given us an interesting account in the essay prefixed to The Conquest of Granada.

"The first light we had of them in the English Theatre was from the late Sir William Davenant. It being forbidden him in the rebellious times to act tragedies and comedies, because they contained some matter of scandal to those good people who could more easily dispossess their lawful sovereign than endure a wanton jest, he was forced to turn his thoughts another way, and to introduce the examples of moral virtue, writ in verse, and

performed in recitative music. The original of this music he had from the Italian operas; but he heightened his characters (as I may probably imagine) from the example of Corneille and some French poets. In this condition did this part of poetry remain at his Majesty's return, when growing bolder, as being now owned by a public authority, he reviewed his Siege of Rhodes, and caused it to be acted as a just drama. For myself and others who came after him we are bound, with all veneration to his memory, to acknowledge what advantage we received from that excellent ground work which he laid. Having done him this justice as my guide, I will do myself so much as to give an account of what I have performed after him. I observed then, as I said, what was wanting to the perfection of his Siege of Rhodes, which was design and variety of characters. And in the midst of this consideration, by mere accident, I opened the next book that lay by me, which was an Ariosto in Italian; and the very first two lines of that poem gave me light to all I could desire

'Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori,

Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto.'

For the very next reflection that I made was this: that an heroic play ought to be an imitation in little of an heroic poem, and consequently that love and valour ought to be the subject of it."*

Dryden has omitted to notice that these plays undoubtedly owed much both to the French dramatists, particularly to Corneille, and to the French Heroic Romances of D'Urfé, Gomberville, Calprenède, and

* Dr. Ward, following Sir Walter Scott and others, asserts in his English Dramatic Literature that Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, was the originator of these rhymed Heroic Plays, and he refers in proof of the statement to Dryden's Preface to The Rival Ladies. But Dryden says nothing of the kind. He represents himself as being the originator of these plays, afterwards modifying this statement by assigning to Davenant the credit of having given the hint for them.

Madame de Scuderi, borrowing from the first the cast of the rhymed verse, and from the second the stilted and bombastic sentiment, as well as innumerable hints in matters of detail.

With this notion of the scope and functions of the Heroic Drama, Dryden set to work. Carefully selecting such material as would be most appropriate for rhetorical treatment and most remote from ordinary life, he drew sometimes on the Heroic French Romances, as in The Maiden Queen, which is derived from The Grand Cyrus, and in The Conquest of Granada, which is based on the Almahide of Madame Scuderi; sometimes on the exotic fictions of Spanish, Portuguese, or Eastern legend, as in The Indian Emperor and Aurengzebe; or on the misty annals of early Christian martyrology, as in The Royal Martyr; or on the dreamland of poets, as in The State of Innocence. All is false and unreal. The world in which his characters move is not merely a world which has no counterpart in human experience, but is so incongruous and chaotic that it is simply unintelligible and unimaginable, even as fiction. His men and women are men and women only by courtesy. It would be more correct to speak of them as puppets tricked out in phantastic tinsel, the showman, as he jerks them, not taking the trouble to speak through them in falsetto, but merely talking in his natural voice. And in nearly every drama we have the same leading puppets-the one in a male, the other in a female form. The male impersonates either a ranting, blustering tyrant, all fanfarado and bombast, like Almanzor and Maximim, or some sorely-tried and pseudo-chivalrous hero, like Cortez and Aurungzebe; the female some meretricious Dulcinea, who is the object of

But

the male hero's desires and adoration. This Dulcinea has usually some rival Dulcinea to vex and bring her out, and the tyrant, or preux chevalier, some rival opponent who serves the same purpose. This enables the poet to pit these characters against each other in declamation and dialogue, and it is these interbanded declamations and dialogues which make up the greater part, or at least the most effective parts, of the dramas. Not that scenic effects are ignored, for battles, processions, feasts, sensational arrests, harryings, murders, and attempted murders, outrages, and every variety of agitating surprise break up and diversify these dialogues and declamations with most admired disorder. worthless and absurd as these plays are from a dramatic point of view, they are very far from being without merit. The charm of their versification, which is seen in its highest perfection in The Conquest of Granada, The Indian Emperor, Aurengzebe, and The State of Innocence is irresistible, preserving a singular and exquisite combination of dignity and grace, of vigour and sweetness. Dryden is always impressive when he clothes moral reflections. in verse, and some of his finest passages in this kind are to be found in these plays. But perhaps their most remarkable feature is the rhymed argumentative dialogue. Dryden's power of maintaining an argument in verse, of putting with epigrammatic terseness, in sonorous and musical rhythm, the case for and against in any given subject, was unrivalled; and he revelled in its exercise. We may select for illustration the dialogue between Almanzor and Almahide in the third act of the First Part of the Conquest of Granada; that between Cydaria and Cortez in

the second act of The Conquest of Mexico; that between Indamora and Arimant in the second act of Aurengzebe; and that in which St. Catharine converts Apollonius from Paganism to Christianity in the second act of Tyrannic Love. But if these plays add nothing to Dryden's reputation, it was in their composition that he trained, developed, and matured the powers which enabled him to produce with a rapidity so wonderful the masterpieces on which his fame rests.

In the summer of 1665 the plague closed the theatres, and drove all whose circumstances enabled them to leave London into the country. The greater part of the time intervening between the breaking up of the plague and the beginning of 1667 Dryden appears to have passed at Charlton Park, in Wiltshire, the seat of his father-inlaw. He occupied his time in the production of two memorable works-the Annus Mirabilis and the Essay of Dramatic Poesy-the one being published in 1667, the other in 1668.* Both these works may be said to mark epochs in the history of English literature. The Annus Mirabilis, which is a historical narrative of the chief incidents of the year 1666-the war against Holland in coalition with France, and the Fire of London--exhibits with singular precision the characteristics of that school of poetry of which Dryden was to be the leader-the poetry of rhetoric. In the Essay of Dramatic Poesy Dryden not only gave the first striking illustration of his characteristic prose style, but he produced what is incom

*It was entered on the Stationers' Books August 7th, 1667, and, according to Malone, published in that year, but the date on the title page of the first edition is 1668: books, it may be added, were in those days not unfrequently ante-dated.