rama. Unreal infused
into real, turns real at once into poetry. But this is of all degrees.
In the lowest prose of life there is an infusion which we overlook. We
should drop down dead without it. Let the unreal a little predominate;
and now we become sensible to its presence, and now we _call_ the
compound poetry. Let it be an affair of words, and we require verse as
the fitting form. Our stage and language have settled upon blank verse
as the proper metrical form for the proper measure of the unreal upon
the ordinary tragic stage. Rhymed verse has a more marked separation, or
is more distant from prose than blank verse is. Hence, you might suppose
that it will be fitted on the stage for a surcharge of the unreal.
Dryden's heroic tragedies are a proof, as far as one authority goes; and
even they had great power over audiences willing to be charmed, and
accustomed to what we should think a wide and continued departure from
nature. But imagine a romantic play, full of beautiful and tender
imagination, exquisitely written in rhyme, and modelled to some suitable
mould invented by a happy genius. Why, the "Gentle Shepherd," idealizing
modern Scottish pastoral life, was, in its humble way, an achievement;
and, within our memory, critics of the old school looked on it well
pleased when acted by lads and lasses of high degree, delighting to deem
themselves for an evening the simple dwellers in huts around Habbie's
How.

Let us now collect together all that Dryden has, in different moods of
his unsettled and unsteady mind, written about Shakspeare. In the
Dialogue formerly spoken of, comparisons are made between the modern
English and the modern French drama. "If you consider the plots," says
Neander, "our own are fuller of variety, if the writing, ours are more
quick and fuller of spirit." And he denies--like a bold man as he
was--that the English have in aught imitated or borrowed from the
French. He says our plots are weaved in English looms; we endeavour
therein to follow the variety and greatness of characters, which are
derived to us from Shakspeare and Fletcher; the copiousness and
well-knitting of the intrigues we have from Jonson. These two things he
dares affirm of the English drama, that with more variety of plot and
character, it has equal regularity; and that in most of the irregular
plays of Shakspeare and Fletcher, (for Ben Jonson's are for the most
part regular,) there is a more masculine fancy and greater spiri