For I am doz'd so weary with complaining.
That I could stand and listen to the winds,
or
For straight when the sick priest had breathed his last,
The sacred oil which for a hundred years
Supplied the sun behind the golden veil,
Went out and all the mystic lights were quenched.
Undeniably there was poetry in Lee, but to the pathos, concentration, and construction of Otway he does not attain. He was born in Hertfordshire, and educated in Westminster, and Trinity, Cambridge. He was at intervals insane, and while reading the speeches of his characters we sometimes seem to "stand and listen to the winds" of a wild night of autumn.
There is a kind of furious magnificence in the tempestuous tirades of Pharnaces with which the play of "Mithradates" opens, and throughout the terrors of that piece "The old winds cease not blowing and all the night thunders". The same vigour displays itself in his first tragedy (1675), written partly in "new" rhymed heroic couplets. The ghost of Caligula would
Burn palaces; like Thunder I would rove,
Tear the tall woods, and rend each sacred grove.
Lee is, by the way, far too prodigal of his ghosts. His age, at all events the theatre-going part of his contemporaries, was apt to jest at ghosts, following Webster and Wagstaffe, and unconvinced by Henry More, Glanvill in "Sadducismus Triumphatus," and the other founders of "Psychical Research".
In 1677, Lee, with "The Rival Queens," made a success which long held the stage, and the names of Statira and Roxana, rivals for the love of Alexander the Great, live in memory. Dryden wrote the prologue of the piece, protesting that he was not "logrolling," and comparing the poet to "Titian and Angelo". Lee loved a ghost, and that of Philip of Macedon "shakes his truncheon at 'em," at the conspirators against Alexander, whom two queens adore with furious passion. Statira's first words demand
a knife, a draught of poison, flames!
but, instantly relenting, for she has heard that Alexander loves Roxana, she praises the faithless conqueror:—