up English style, though on no subsequent occasion did he repeat the mistake. By degrees the example and influence of Molière sent complicated plots and "humours " alike out of fashion, though the national taste and temperament were too strongly in favour of the latter to allow them to be totally banished. In our very best plays of the so-called artificial style, such as Love for Love, and the masterpieces of Sheridan, character sketches to which Ben Jonson himself would certainly not refuse the title of humours appear, and contribute a large portion of the interest. Dryden, however, was not likely to anticipate this better time, or even to distinguish himself in the older form of the humour-comedy. He had little aptitude for the odd and quaint, nor had he any faculty of devising or picking strokes of extravagance, such as those which his enemy Shadwell could command, though he could make no very good use of them. The humours of Trice and Bibber and Lord Nonsuch in the Wild Gallant are forced and too often feeble, though there are flashes here and there, especially in the part of Sir Timorous, a weakling of the tribe of Aguecheek; but in this first attempt, the one situation and the one pair of characters which Dryden was to treat with tolerable success are already faintly sketched. In Constance and Loveby, the pair of lighthearted lovers who carry on a flirtation without too much modesty certainly, and with a remarkable absence of refinement, but at the same time with some genuine affection for one another and in a hearty, natural manner, maketheir first appearance. It is to be noted in Dryden's favour that these lovers of his are for the most part free from the charge of brutal heartlessness and cruelty, which has been justly brought against those of Etherege, of Wycherley, and, at least in the case of the Old Bachelor, of Congreve. The men are rakes, and rather vulgar rakes, but they are nothing worse. The women have too many of the characteristics of Charles the Second's maids of honour; but they have, at the same time, a certain healthiness and sweetness of the older days, which bring them, if not close to Rosalind and Beatrice, at any rate pretty near to Fletcher's heroines, such as Dorothea and Mary. Still the Wild Gallant can by no possibility be called a good play. It was followed, at no long interval, by the Rival Ladies, a tragicomedy, which is chiefly remarkable for containing some heroic scenes in rhyme, for imitating closely the tangled and improbable plot of its Spanish original, for being tolerably decent, and I fear it must be added, for being intolerably dull. The third venture was in every way more important. The Indian Emperor (1665) was Dryden's first original play, his first heroic play, and indirectly formed part of a curious literary dispute, one of many in which he was engaged, but which in this case proved fertile in critical studies of his best brand. Sir Robert Howard, Dryden's brother-inlaw, had with the assistance of Dryden himself, produced a play called the Indian Queen, and to this the Indian Emperor was nominally a sequel. But as Dryden remarks, with a quaintness which may or may not be satirical, the conclusion of the Indian Queen "left but little matter to build upon, there remaining but two of the considerable characters alive." The good Sir Robert had indeed heaped the stage with dead in his last act in a manner which must have confirmed any French critic who saw or read the play in his belief of the bloodthirstiness of the English drama. The field was thus completely clear, and Dryden, retaining only Montezuma as his hero, used his own fancy and invention without restraint in constructing the plot and arranging the characters. The play was extremely popular, and it divides with Tyrannic Love and the Conquest of Granada the merit of being the best of all English heroic plays. The origin of that singular growth has been already given, and there is no need to repeat the story, while the Conquest of Granada is so much more the model play of the style, that anything like an analysis of a heroic play had better be reserved for this. The Indian Emperor was followed, in 1667, by the Maiden Queen, a tragicomedy. The tragic or heroic part is very inferior to its predecessor, but the comic part has merits which are by no means inconsiderable. Celadon and Florimel are the first finished specimens of that pair of practitioners of light o' love flirtation which was Dryden's sole contribution of any value to the comic stage. Charles gave the play particular commendation, and called it "his play," as Dryden takes care to tell us. Still in the same year came Sir Martin Marall, Dryden's second pure comedy. But it is in no sense an original play, and Dryden was not even the original adapter. The Duke of Newcastle, famous equally for his own gallantry in the civil war and for the oddities of his second duchess, Margaret Lucas, translated l'Etourdi, and gave it to Dryden, who perhaps combined with it some things taken from other French plays, added not a little of his own, and had it acted. It was for those days exceedingly successful, running more than thirty nights at its first appearance. It is very coarse in parts, but amusing enough. The English blunderer is a much more contemptible person than his French original. He is punished instead of being rewarded, and there is a great deal of broad farce brought in. Dryden was about this time frequently engaged in this doubtful sort of col The ex laboration, and the very next play which he produced, also a result of it, has done his reputation more harm than any other. This was the disgusting burlesque of the Tempest, which, happily, there is much reason for thinking belongs almost wholly to Davenant. Besides degrading in every way the poetical merit of the poem, Sir William, from whom better things might have been expected, got into his head what Dryden amiably calls the "excellent contrivance" of giving Miranda a sister, and inventing a boy (Hippolito) who has never seen a woman. cellent contrivance gives rise to a good deal of extremely characteristic wit. But here, too, there is little reason for giving Dryden credit or discredit for anything more than a certain amount of arrangement and revision. His next appearance, in 1668, with the Mock Astrologer was a more independent one. He was indeed, as was very usual with him, indebted to others for the main points of his play, which comes partly from Thomas Corneille's Feint Astrologue, partly from the Dépit Amoureux. But the play, with the usual reservations, may be better spoken of than any of Dryden's comedies, except Marriage à la Mode and Amphitryon. Wildblood and Jacintha, who play the parts of Celadon and Florimel in the Maiden Queen, are a very lively pair. Much of the dialogue is smart, and the incidents are stirring, while the play contains no less than four of the admirable songs which Dryden now began to lavish on his audiences. In the same year, or perhaps in 1669, appeared the play of Tyrannic Love, or the Royal Martyr, a compound of exquisite beauties and absurdities of the most frantic description. The part of St. Catherine (very inappropriately allotted to Mrs. Eleanor Gwyn) is beautiful throughout, and that of Maximin is quite captivating in its outrageousness. The Astral spirits who appear gave occasion for some terrible parody in the Rehearsal, but their verses are in themselves rather attractive. An account of the final scene of the play will perhaps show better than anything else the rant and folly in which authors indulged, and which audiences applauded in these plays. The Emperor Maximin is dissatisfied with the conduct of the upper powers in reference to his domestic peace; he thus expresses his dissatisfaction: What had the gods to do with me or mine? Why should you then make Maximin your foe, More than your sun could draw you in a year. Hostility with you and yours declare. Look to it, gods! for you the aggressors are, Thereupon an aggrieved and possibly shocked follower, of the name of Placidius, stabs him, but the Emperor wrests the dagger from him and returns the blow. Then follows this stage direction: "Placidius falls and the Emperor staggers after him and sits down upon him." From this singular throne his guards offer to assist him. clines help, and having risen once sits down again upon Placidius, who, despite the stab and the weight of the Emperor, is able to address an irreproachable decasyllabic But he de |