My power gives them wings, and pleasure arms thy will!
There is nothing which destroys the reality in a dramatic dialogue more than when the speakers ask questions and reply in an equal quantity of lines. Perhaps the most disgusting instance of this is in Milton’s Mask, where Comus and the Lady have a verse each alternately, for fourteen lines together. We are more sensible of the sameness in quantity where it is so short, and so often repeated, than here in Quarles where it is extended to a stanza, and that repeated for each speaker but once—but even here you begin to feel its bad effect, when it is finely relieved towards the end by the characters growing warmer in their dispute, and, of course, making their speeches shorter. Yet what I here condemn, others admire.——You, who are so fond of the ancients, may easily defend this practice by their example, and if you want any assistance to demolish me, may call in Mr. West and the author of the Origin and Progress of Language.—This passage of the former from his translation of the Iphigenia of Euripedes is quoted by the latter with great commendations——not indeed because the dialogue is in alternate verse, but for its being a fine imitation of the ancient trochaic measure.
Iph. Know’st thou what should now be ordered?
Tho. ’Tis thy office to prescribe.
Iph. Let them bind in chains the strangers.
Tho. Canst thou fear they should escape?
Iph. Trust no Greek; Greece is perfidious.
Tho. Slaves depart, and bind the Greeks.
Iph. Having bound, conduct them hither, &c.
It is true that here the reply wants one of having the same number of syllables as the question—but still the constant return of the same quantity for each speaker is disgusting to all unprejudiced ears. You will tell me that it is in the high gusto of the antique, and that the feet are trochaics—I can only reply, that hard words cannot convince me contrary to reason, and if a proper effect is not produced, it is of very little consequence to me whether the authority is brought from Greece or Siberia. Horace’s often-quoted Pallida mors, &c. was perhaps never better translated than at the end of the fourth stanza.