n clay of the earth," dukes, princes, kings,
and kaisars. The matters agitated must be of moment, proportioned to
their characters and elevated station, the fate of cities and the fall
of kingdoms.

That the language, as well as actions and character of the _dramatis
personae_, might be raised above the vulgar, their sentiments were
delivered in rhyme, the richest and most ornate kind of verse, and the
farthest removed from ordinary colloquial diction. Dryden has himself
assigned the following reasons:--"The plot, the characters, the wit, the
passions, the descriptions, are all exalted above the level of common
converse, as high as the imagination of the poet can carry them, with
proportion to verisimility. Tragedy, we know, is wont to image to us the
minds and fortunes of noble persons, and to portray these exactly;
heroic rhyme is nearest nature, as being the noblest kind of modern
verse.

_Indignatur enim priratis et prope socco
Dignis carminibus narrari coena Thyestae_--

says Horace: and in another place,

_Effutire leves indigna tragaedia versus_.--

Blank verse is acknowledged to be too low for a poem, nay more, for a
paper of verses; but if too low for an ordinary sonnet, how much more
for tragedy, which is by Aristotle, in the dispute betwixt the epic
poesy and the dramatic, for many reasons he there alleges, ranked above
it."

When we consider these various essentials of a rhyming play, we may
perhaps, without impropriety define it to be a metrical romance of
chivalry in form of a drama. The hero is a perfect knight-errant,
invincible in battle, and devoted to his Dulcinea by a love, subtle,
metaphysical and abstracted from all the usual qualities of the
instinctive passion; his adventures diversified by splendid descriptions
of bull-feasts, battles, and tournaments; his fortune undergoing the
strangest, most causeless, and most unexpected varieties; his history
chequered by the marvellous interference of ghosts, spectres, and hell
itself; his actions effecting the change of empires, and his co-agents
being all lords, and dukes, and noble princes, in order that their rank
might, in some slight degree, correspond to the native exultation of the
champion's character.

The reader may smile at this description, and feel some surprise, how
compositions, involving such gross absurdities, were tolerated by an
audience having pretence to taste and civilisation But something may be
said for the heroic d