The Works of John Dryden

than remaining where he was. The grave and stoical character of the hero is more suitable to the French than the English stage; nor had the general conduct of the play that interest, or perhaps bustle, which is necessary to fix the attention of the promiscuous audience of London. In a theatre, where every man may, if he will, express his dissatisfaction, in defiance of beaux-esprits, nobles, or mousquetaires, that which is dull will seldom be long fashionable: "Cleomenes” was accordingly coldly received. Dryden published it with a dedication to Lord Rochester, and the Life of Cleomenes prefixed, as translated from Plutarch by Creech, that it might appear how false those reports were, which imputed to him the composing a Jacobite play.

Omitting, for the present, Dryden's intermediate employments, I hasten to close his dramatic career, by mentioning, that "Love Triumphant," his last play, was acted in 1692 with very bad success. Those who look over this piece, which is in truth one of the worst our author ever wrote, can be at no loss to discover sufficient reason for its condemnation. The comic

part approaches to farce, and the tragic unites the wild and unnatural changes and counterchanges of the Spanish tragedy, with the involu

tions of unnatural and incestuous passion, which the British audience has been always averse to admit as a legitimate subject of dramatic pity or terror. But it cannot be supposed, that Dryden received the failure with any thing like an admission of its justice. He was a veteran foiled in the last of his theatrical trials of skill, and retreated for ever from the stage, with expressions which transferred the blame from himself to his judges; for, in the dedication to James, the fourth Earl of Salisbury, a relation of Lady Elizabeth, and connected with the poet by a similarity of religious and political opinions, he declares, that the characters of the persons in the drama are truly drawn, the fable not injudiciously contrived, the changes of fortune not unartfully managed, and the catastrophe happily introduced: thus leaving, were the author's opinion to be admitted as decisive, no grounds upon which the critics could ground their opposition. The enemies of Dryden, as usual, triumphed greatly in the fall of this piece ;* and thus the dramatic

* For example, in a Session of the Poets, under the fictitious name of Matthew Coppinger, Dryden is thus irreverently introduced:

A reverend grisly elder first appear'd,

With solemn pace through the divided herd;

career of Dryden began and closed with bad suc

cess.

This Section cannot be more properly concluded than with the list which Mr Malone has drawn out of Dryden's plays, with the respective dates of their being acted and published; which is a correction and enlargement of that subjoined by the author himself to the opera of "Prince Arthur." Henceforward we are to consider Dryden as unconnected with the stage.