speare and
Fletcher went no further, that there the pillars of poetry were to be
erected; that because they excellently described passion without rhyme,
therefore rhyme was not capable of describing it. _"But time has since
convinced most men of that error._"

What, then, according to Dryden's idea of it, was a serious or heroic
play? An heroic play, he says, ought to be an imitation, in little, of
an heroic poem; and, consequently, Love and Valour ought to be the
subject of it. D'Avenant's astonishing "Siege of Rhodes"--formerly
declared to be the _beau-ideal_ of an heroic play--was after all, it
seems, wanting in fulness of plot, variety of character, and even beauty
of style. Above all, it was not sufficiently great and majestic. He knew
not, honest man, that, in a true heroic play, you ought to draw all
things as far above the ordinary proportion of the stage, as that is
beyond the common words and actions of human life. The play that
imitates mere nature as she walks in this world, may be written in
suitable language; but, as in epic poetry all poets have agreed that we
shall behold the highest pattern of human life, so in the heroic play,
modelled by the rules of an heroic poem, we must be shown only
correspondent characters. Gods and spirits, too, are privileged to
appear on such a stage, and so are drums and trumpets. But Dryden
himself denies that he was the first to introduce representations of
battles on the English stage, Shakspeare having set him the example;
while Jonson, though he shows no battle, lets you hear in "Catiline,"
from behind the scenes, the shouts of fighting armies. Warlike
instruments, and some fighting on the stage, are indeed necessary to
produce the effects of a heroic play. They help the imagination to gain
absolute dominion over the mind of an audience.

Were we to believe Dryden, his heroic plays were dramatic imitations of
such epic poems as the Iliad and the AEneid. And he has the brazen-faced
assurance to say, that the first image he had of Almanzor, in the
"Conquest of Grenada," was from the Achilles of Homer! The next was
from Tasso's Rinaldo, and the third--_risum teneatis amici--from the
Artaban of Monsieur Calpranede_! Unquestionably our English heroic plays
were borrowed from the French--as these were the legitimate offspring of
the dramas of Calpranede and Scuderi. But Dryden's compositions are
unparalleled in any literature. Nature is systematically outraged in one
and al