9372 of 1889,

PREFACE.

IT is interesting to note that the same cause the great plague of 1665-which drove Milton from London to the Buckinghamshire village of Chalfont St. Giles, and there gave him leisure to complete the Paradise Lost, obliged Dryden also-the theatres being closedto pass eighteen months in the country,-'probably at Charlton in Wiltshire,' says Malone,-where he turned his leisure to so good an account as, besides writing the 'Annus Mirabilis,' to compose in the following Essay the first piece of good modern English prose on which our literature can pride itself.

Charles II, having been much in Paris during his exile, had been captivated by the French drama, then in the powerful hands of Corneille and Molière. In that drama, when prose was not employed, the use of rhyme was an essential feature.

Dryden and others were not slow to consult the taste prevailing at Court. His first play, The Wild Gallant, was in prose; it is coarse and not much enlivened by wit, and it was not well received. In his next efforts Dryden took greater pains. He seems to have convinced himself that the attraction of rhyme was necessary to please the fastidious audiences for which he had to write;

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and after The Rival Ladies, which is partly in rhyme partly in blank verse, and The Indian Queen (1664), a play entirely rhymed, in which he assisted his brother-inlaw Sir Robert Howard, he brought out, early in 1665, his tragedy of The Indian Emperor, which, like The Indian Queen, is carefully rhymed throughout. In the enforced leisure which his residence at Charlton during the plague brought him, he thought over the whole subject, and this Essay of Dramatic Poesy was the result.

In the course of time Dryden modified more or less the judgment in favour of rhyme which he had given in the Essay. In the prologue to the tragedy of Aurungzebe, or the Great Mogul (1675), he says that he finds it more difficult to please himself than his audience, and is inclined to damn his own play :

Not that it's worse than what before he writ,

But he has now another taste of wit;

And, to confess a truth, though out of time,

Grows weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme.

Passion, he proceeds, is too fierce to be bound in fetters; and the sense of Shakspere's unapproachable superiority, —Shakspere, whose masterpieces dispense with rhyme,— inclines him to quit the stage altogether. Nevertheless his original contention, however under the pressure of dejection, and the sense perhaps of flagging powers, he may afterwards have been willing to abandon it,—cannot be lightly set aside as either weak or unimportant; a point on which I shall have something to say presently.

Five critical questions are handled in the Essay, viz.— 1. The relative merits of ancient and modern poets.

2. Whether the existing French school of drama is superior or inferior to the English.

3. Whether the Elizabethan dramatists were in all points superior to those of Dryden's own time.

4. Whether plays are more perfect in proportion as they conform to the dramatic rules laid down by the ancients.

5. Whether the substitution of rhyme for blank verse in serious plays is an improvement.

The first point, is considered in the remarks of Crites (Sir Robert Howard), with which the discussion opens. In connexion with it the speaker deals with the fourth point, assuming without proof that regard to the unities of Time and Place, inasmuch as it tends to heighten the illusion of reality, must place the authors who pay it above those who neglect it. Eugenius (Lord Buckhurst) answers him, pointing out the narrow range of the Greek drama, and several defects which its greatest admirers cannot deny. Crites makes a brief reply, and then Lisideius (Sir Charles Sedley) plunges into the second question, and ardently maintains that the French theatre, which was formerly inferior to ours, now,—since it had been ennobled by the rise of Corneille and his fellow-workers, -surpasses it and the rest of Europe. This commendation he grounds partly on their exact observance of the dramatic rules, partly on their exclusion of undue complication from their plots and general regard to the ' decorum of the stage,' partly also on the beauty of their rhyme. Neander (Dryden) takes up the defence of the English stage, and tries to show that it is superior to the

French at every point. 'we have English precedents of older date than any of Corneille's plays.' By 'verse' he means rhyme. He is not rash enough to quote Gammer Gurton's Needle and similar plays, with their hobbling twelve-syllable couplets, as 'precedents' earlier than the graceful French Alexandrines, but he urges that Shakspere in his early plays has long rhyming passages, and that Jonson is not without them. At this point Eugenius breaks in with the question, Whether Ben Jonson ought not to rank before all other writers, both French and English. Before undertaking to decide this point, Neander says that he will attempt to estimate the dramatic genius of Shakspere, and of Beaumont and Fletcher. This he does, in an interesting and well-known passage (p. 67). He then examines the genius of Jonson with reference to many special points, and gives an analysis of the plot of his comedy, Epicene, or the Silent Woman; but he gives no direct answer to the question put by Eugenius. To the English stage as a whole he will not allow a position of inferiority; for 'our nation can never want in any age such who are able to dispute the empire of wit with any people in the universe.'

For the verse itself,' he says,

Crites now introduces the subject of rhyme, which he maintains to be unsuitable for serious plays. His argument, and Neander's answer, take up the rest of the Essay.

The personages who conduct the discussion are all of a social rank higher than that to which Dryden belonged. Sir Robert Howard, the son of the Earl of Berkshire,