s, every state,
With tears lament the knight's untimely fate.
Nor greater grief in falling Troy was seen
For Hector's death, but Hector was not then.
Old men with dust deform'd their hoary hair;
The women beat their breasts, their cheeks they tear:
Why wouldst thou go, (with one consent they cry,)
When thou hadst gold enough, and Emily?

Dryden, you observe, exhibits various changes. Are they for the better
or the worse? In the first place, he introduces a new motive into the
conduct of Arcite--remorse of conscience. When fate has declared against
him, and he finds that he cannot enjoy the possession of the prize which
he has wrongfully won, his eyes open upon his own injustice, and he
acknowledges the prior right of Palamon, who first had seen Emilie.

Does this innovation make good an ethical want in the rough and
unschooled original? Or does it perplex the old heroic simplicity with a
modern and needless refinement? By right of arms, by gift of the king,
with her own gentle consent, Emelie was Arcite's. Death unsinews the
hand that held her against the world. Let a few winged moments fleet,
and she is his no more. He bows, conquered by all-conquering, alone
unconquerable necessity. His love, which had victoriously expelled his
cousin's from the field of debate, he carries with him to the melancholy
Plutonic kingdom, and leaves the field of debate still--Palamon victor,
and Emelie free. Really there seems to be something not only simpler in
art, but more pathetic, and even morally greater, in the humble
submission of the fierce and giant-like spirit to inevitable decree--in
the spontaneous return of the pristine fraternal appreciation when death
withdraws the disturbing force of rivalry--and in his voluntarily
appointing, so far as he ventures to appoint, his brother in arms and
his bride to each other's happiness--than in the inventive display of a
compunction for which, as the world goes, there appears to be positively
no use, and hardly clear room. Loftily viewing the case, a wrong has
been intended by Arcite to Palamon, but no wrong done. He has been twice
hacked and hewed a little--that is all; and it cannot be said that he
has been robbed of her who would not have been his. Indeed, the current
of destiny has so run, that the quarrel of the two noble kinsmen has
brought, as apparently it alone could bring, the survivor to wedlock
with his beloved. We suspect, then, that the attributi