And my dear love is vanquished in a mist.
Where shall I find him, where? O turn me to him,
And lay me on his breast! Cæsar, thy worst;
Now part us, if thou canst.[Dies.
[Iras sinks down at her feet, and dies; Charmion stands behind her chair, as dressing her head.
After the Revolution he wrote Don Sebastian (1690), Cleomenes (1691), and Love Triumphant (1694). The last was a tragi-comedy and a failure. The other two, however, were quite up to the average of his plays. In addition, at various stages of his career he collaborated with Lee in two other tragedies, and attempted, with lamentable results, to improve upon Shakespeare’s Tempest and Troilus and Cressida.
4. His Prose. Dryden’s versatility is apparent when we observe that in prose, as well as in poetry and drama, he attains to primacy in his generation. In the case of prose he has one rival, John Bunyan. No single item of Dryden’s prose work is of very great length; but in his Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1668), in his numerous dedicatory epistles and prefaces, and in the scanty stock of his surviving letters we have a prose corpus of some magnitude. The general subject of his prose is literary criticism, and that of a sane and vigorous quality. The style is free, but not too free; there are slips of grammar, but they are not many. The Essay of Dramatic Poesie is his longest single prose work. It is cast into dialogue form, in which four characters, one of whom is Dryden himself, discuss such well-worked themes as ancients versus moderns and blank verse versus rhyme. Studded throughout the book are passages of rare ability, one of which is the following, which illustrates not only his prose style, but also his acute perception of literary values:
To begin, then, with Shakespeare. He was the man who, of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily; when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation. He was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,
Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.
Virg., Ecl., i, 26