and after The Rival Ladies, of which a small part is in rhyme, and The Indian Queen (1664), a play entirely rhymed, in which he assisted his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard, he brought out, early in 1665, his tragedy of The Indian Emperor, which, like The Indian Queen, is carefully rhymed throughout. In the enforced leisure which his residence at Charlton during the plague brought him, he thought over the whole subject, and this Essay of Dramatic Poesy was the result.

In the course of time Dryden modified more or less the judgment in favour of rhyme which he had given in the Essay. In the prologue to the tragedy of Aurungzebe, or the Great Mogul (1675), he says that he finds it more difficult to please himself than his audience, and is inclined to damn his own play

:

Not that it's worse than what before he writ,

But he has now another taste of wit;

And, to confess a truth, though out of time,

Grows weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme.

Passion, he proceeds, is too fierce to be bound in fetters; and the sense of Shakespeare's unapproachable superiority, -Shakespeare, whose masterpieces dispense with rhyme, -inclines him to quit the stage altogether. Nevertheless his original contention, however under the pressure of dejection, and the sense perhaps of flagging powers, he may afterwards have been willing to abandon it,—cannot be lightly set aside as either weak or unimportant; a point on which I shall have something to say presently.

Five critical questions are handled in the Essay, viz.— (1. The relative merits of ancient and modern poets.

2 Whether the existing French school of drama is superior or inferior to the English.

3 Whether the Elizabethan dramatists were in all points superior to those of Dryden's own time.

4 Whether plays are more perfect in proportion as they conform to the dramatic rules laid down by the ancients.

5.) Whether the substitution of rhyme for blank verse in serious plays is an improvement.

I The first point is considered in the remarks of Crites

(Sir Robert Howard), with which the discussion opens. In 4 connexion with it the speaker deals with the fourth point, assuming without proof that regard to the unities of Time and Place, inasmuch as it tends to heighten the illusion of reality, must place the authors who pay it above those who neglect it. Eugenius (Lord Buckhurst) answers him, pointing out the narrow range of the Greek drama, and several defecis which its greatest admirers cannot deny. Crites makes a brief reply, and then Lisideius (Sir Charles Sedley) plunges into the second question, and ardently maintains that the French theatre, which was formerly inferior to ours, now,-since it had been ennobled by the rise of Corneille and his fellow-workers, -surpasses it and the rest of Europe. This commendation he grounds partly on their exact observance of the dramatic rules, partly on their exclusion of undue complication from their plots and general regard to the 'decorum of the stage,' partly also on the beauty of their 3 rhyme. Neander (Dryden) takes up the defence of the English stage, and tries to show that it is superior to the

A

French at every point. For the verse itself,' he says, 'we have English precedents of older date than any of Corneille's plays.' By 'verse' he means rhyme. He is not rash enough to quote Gammer Gurton's Needle and similar plays, with their hobbling twelve-syllable couplets, as 'precedents' earlier than the graceful French Alexandrines, but he urges that Shakespeare in his early plays has long rhyming passages, and that Jonson is not without them. At this point Eugenius breaks in with the question, Whether Ben Jonson ought not to rank before all other writers, both French and English. Before undertaking to decide this point, Neander says that he will attempt to estimate the dramatic genius of Shakespeare, and of Beaumont and Fletcher. This he does, in an interesting and well-known passage (p. 67). He then examines the genius of Jonson with reference to many special points, and gives an analysis of the plot of his comedy, Epicoene, or the Silent Woman; but he gives no direct answer to the question put by Eugenius. To the English stage as a whole he will not allow a position of inferiority; for our nation can never want in any age such who are able to dispute the empire of wit with any people in the universe' (p. 77).

Crites now introduces the subject of rhyme, which he maintains to be unsuitable for serious plays. His argument, and Neander's answer, take up the rest of the Essay.

The personages who conduct the discussion are all of a social rank higher than that to which Dryden belonged. Sir Robert Howard, the son of the Earl of Berkshire, assumed the poet's lyre or the critic's stylus with an air

of superiority which showed that he thought it a condescension in himself, a man of fashion, to associate with the poverty-stricken tribe of authors". This tone is very noticeable in the Preface to The Duke of Lerma, which Dryden answered in his Defence of the Essay. Sir Charles Sedley was a well-known Kentish baronet, and Lord Buckhurst, soon to be the Earl of Dorset, was heir to the illustrious house of Sackville. It is unlikely however that Dryden called himself 'Neander 'n in the sense of 'novus homo,' a man of the people, desiring to rise above his station. Dryden was too proud of his own good birth for that, and the term appears to be a rough anagram on his own name, just as Lisideius was on that of Sedley.

This question as to the value of rhyme in dramatic poetry is by no means an obsolete or unprofitable inquiry; it still exercises our minds in the nineteenth century; it has received no permanent, no authoritative solution. It is usually assumed that Dryden was altogether wrong in preferring the heroic couplet to blank verse as the metre of serious dramas; and his own subsequent abandonment of rhyme-foreshadowed, as we have seen, in the prologue to Aurung-zebe—is regarded as an admission that his argument in favour of it was unsound. And yet much of what he says in defence of rhyme appears to be plain common sense and incontrovertible, and to deserve, whatever his later practice may have been, a careful consideration. After all, if the heroic rhyming plays of Dryden and Lee have found no successors, has not blank verse also notoriously failed, however able the hands which wielded it, to be

come the vehicle and instrument of an English dramatic school, worthy to be ranked alongside of the great Elizabethans? Since Dryden's, almost the only supremely excellent plays which English literature has produced are Sheridan's; and these are comedies, and in prose. Coleridge, Young, Addison, Byron, Shelley, LyttonBulwer,—all attempted tragedy in blank verse; and none of their tragedies can be said to live. The fact is, that the amazing superiority of Shakespeare, lying much more in the matter than in the form of his tragedies, makes us ready to admit at once that blank verse is the proper metre for an English tragedy because he used it. We do not see that the ensemble of the facts of the case,-viz. that no Elizabethan blank verse tragedy, besides those of Shakespeare, can be endured on the stage now, and that those of later dramatists have not been successful,-might lead us to the conclusion that Shakespeare triumphed rather in spite of blank verse than because of it.

Rhyme is merely one of the devices to which the poetic artist has recourse, for the purpose of making his work attractive and successful. Whether we take style, or metre, or quantity, or rhyme, the source of the pleasure seems to be always the same,-it lies in the victory of that which is formed over the formless, of the orderly over the anarchic,-in the substitution of Cosmos for Chaos,-in the felt contrast between the flat and bald converse of common life, and the measured and coloured speech of the orator or poet. Style belongs to prose; metre, quantity, and rhyme to poetry. Metre is the arrangement of the words and syllables of a composi