Dryden to Rowe--the struggle between fashion
(disguised as theory) and instinct (tending in the direction of the
Elizabethan traditions) could never wholly determine itself in favour of
the former.

Lord Orrery, in deference, as he declares, to the expressed tastes of
his sovereign King Charles II. himself, was the first to set up the
standard of _heroic plays_.[211] This new species of tragedy (for such
it professed to be) commended itself by its novel choice of themes, to a
large extent supplied by recent French romance--the _romans de longue
haleine_ of the Scuderys and their contemporaries--and by French plays
treating similar themes. It likewise borrowed from France that garb of
rhyme which the English drama had so long abandoned, and which now
reappeared in the heroic couplet. But the themes which to readers of
novels might seem of their nature inexhaustible could not long suffice
to satisfy the more capricious appetite of theatrical audiences; and the
form, in the application which it was more or less sought to enforce for
it, was doomed to remain an exotic. In conjunction with his
brother-in-law Sir R. Howard,[212] and afterwards more confidently by
himself,[213] Dryden threw the incomparable vigour and brilliancy of his
genius into the scale, which soon rose to the full height of fashionable
popularity. At first he claimed for English tragedy the right to combine
her native inheritance of freedom with these valuable foreign
acquisitions.[214] Nor was he dismayed by the ridicule which the
celebrated burlesque (by the duke of Buckingham and others) of _The
Rehearsal_ (1671) cast upon heroic plays, without discriminating between
them and such other materials for ridicule as the contemporary drama
supplied to its facetious authors, but returned[215] to the defence of a
species which he was himself in the end to abandon.[216] The desire for
change proved stronger than the love of consistency--which in Dryden was
never more than theoretical. After summoning tragedy to rival the
freedom (without disdaining the machinery) of opera--with whose birth
its own revival was as a matter of fact simultaneous--he came to
recognize in characterization the truest secret of the master-spirit of
the Elizabethan drama,[217] and after audaciously, but in one instance
not altogether unhappily, essaying to rival Shakespeare on his own
ground,[218] produced under the influence of the same views at least one
work of striking merit.[219]