They (the players) desired my friend Will Honeycomb to bring me to the reading of the new tragedy; it is called The Distrest Mother. I must confess, though some days are passed since I enjoyed that entertainment, the passions of the several characters dwell strongly upon my imagination; and I congratulate the age that they are at last to see truth and human life represented in the incidents which concern heroes and heroines. The style of the play is such as becomes those of the first education, and the sentiments worthy those of the highest figure.

Addison had previously done all he could to promote the success of Phædra and Hippolytus, for which he wrote the prologue. When the play was coldly received, he ascribed its ill-success to the bad taste of the audience; but the French style never took hold on the English imagination, and the practical failure both of Smith's play and The Distrest Mother, may be ascribed to other causes than those imputed by partial critics. Steele, for example, in his paper on Philips' tragedy, says :—

My friend, Will Honeycomb, commended several tender things that were said, and told me they were very genteel; but whispered me that he feared the piece was not busy enough for the present taste.1

This criticism is philosophically expanded in Johnson's remarks on Phædra and Hippolytus:

Addison has, in the Spectator, mentioned the neglect of Smith's tragedy as disgraceful to the nation, and imputes it to the fondness for opera then prevailing. The authority of Addison is great; yet the voice of the people, when to please the people is the purpose, deserves regard. In this question I cannot but think the people in the right. The fable is mythological, a story which we are accustomed to reject as false; and the manners are so distant from our own that we know them not from sympathy, but by study; the ignorant do not understand the action; the learned reject it as a schoolboy's tale-incredulus odi. What I cannot for a moment believe, I cannot for a moment behold with interest or anxiety. The sentiments thus remote from life are removed yet further by the diction, which is too luxuriant and splendid for dialogue, and envelopes the thoughts rather than

1 Spectator, No. 290.

displays them. It is a scholar's play, such as may please the reader rather than the spectator; the work of a vigorous and elegant mind, accustomed to please itself with its own reflections, but of little acquaintance with the course of life.1

Here we find a trenchant explanation of the difference between French and English dramatic taste; the English have always looked in the first place to the action and character of a play, the French (at least under the Monarchy) to its sentiment and diction. The English dramatists have accordingly frequently resorted to the history of their own country for their subjects, instinctively following the principle of Aristotle, that an audience will more readily believe what it knows to have happened. The French Monarchical poets, with more polish but with less love of liberty, have avoided national themes, as likely to induce prohibitions from authority, and have thrown all their skill into the exhibition of psychological conflicts in more or less abstract situations. The strong reaction in England against the violence of the Caroline drama, as well as the growing sense of critical refinement, naturally encouraged dramatic experiments on our stage in the French style; but these were rarely successful, unless aided by exceptional conditions in the state of party politics. The most brilliant example of such success is, of course, furnished by the fortunes of Addison's Cato.

Cato was produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on the 13th of March 1713, with an effect which is best described in Pope's well-known letter to Trumbull of the 30th of April 1713

The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party on the one side of the theatre were echoed back by the Tories on the other; while the author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause proceeding more from the hand than the head. This was the case, too, with the Prologue-writer, who was clapped into a staunch Whig at the end of every two lines. I believe you have heard that after all the applauses of the opposite faction, my Lord Bolingbroke sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the box, between one of the acts, and presented him with fifty

1 Lives of the Poets: Edmund Smith.

guineas, in acknowledgment, as he expressed it, for defending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator. The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced this way, and, therefore, design a present to the same Cato very speedily; in the meantime they are getting ready as good a sentence as the former on their side; so betwixt them it is possible that Cato (as Dr. Garth expresses it), may have something to live upon after he dies.

When the applause of the hand ceased, the criticism of the head had its turn, and delivered itself in the strictures of Dennis (they are preserved in Johnson's Life of Addison), with some justice, much humour, and more violence. There is no reply possible to Dennis's demonstration of the absurdities arising out of Addison's adherence in Cato to the French principle of Unity of Place. Had he not been so absorbed in labouring this point, Dennis might, indeed, have added that the dramatist does not attain to the French standard of Unity of Action. Cato is, in fact, a striking illustration of Johnson's epigram, that Whiggism consists in negation; the object of all the characters in it, and the result of every situation, seem to be, how not to act. Cato calls the Senate together at Utica to consider what is to be done, but the only effect of their deliberation is, that they must not receive Cæsar's terms; the two heroines find excellent reasons why they cannot admit their lovers' addresses: the lovers on their side cannot advance because each is in the other's way: the two conspirators, Syphax and Sempronius, after endless elaboration of plots, find them all end in smoke, because their fellow-conspirators will not support them: Cato dies, since the sole solution of the political problem seems to be that he cannot live. Everything is, in fact, talked about, but nothing done. On the other hand the talking is often excellent. If sentiment and elegant diction can make amends for defective action, few plays are richer than Cato in sentences like the following:

'Tis not in mortals to command success

But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it,1
So shall we gain still one day's liberty;

VOL. V

1 Cato, Act i. Sc. 2.

2 F

And let me perish, but in Cato's judgment,

A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty

Is worth a whole eternity of bondage.1

Honour's a sacred tie, the law of kings,
The noble mind's distinguishing perfection,

That aids and strengthens virtue when it meets her,
And imitates her action where she is not:

It ought not to be sported with.2

How beautiful is death, when earned by virtue !
Who would not be that youth? what pity is it
That we can die but once to serve our country! 3

(3) While this attempt was being made to naturalise a dramatic style of exotic growth, a parallel movementequally indicative of exhausted invention-was going on, whereby the action and incident of the old English drama was transformed to suit the conditions of eighteenthcentury taste. Of this tendency the most notable landmark is The Fair Penitent. Nicholas Rowe, the author of the play, a member of an old Devonshire family, was born at Little Barford, Bedfordshire, in 1674. He was elected King's Scholar at Westminster in 1688, and while at school read, for his own amusement, a large amount of English literature, including ballads, plays, and romances. He was called to the Bar as a member of the Middle Temple in 1689. Having inherited from his father John Rowe, a barrister, a fortune of £300 a year, he was in easy circumstances, and seems to have become a playwright from inclination. His first tragedy The Ambitious Stepmother, acted in 1700, was followed by Tamerlane in 1702, The Fair Penitent in 1703, and Ulysses in 1706. His last three plays, The Royal Convert (1707), Jane Shore (2nd February 1713-14), Lady Jane Grey (20th April 1715) show an increasing disposition to rely on English historical subjects. He died on the 6th of December 1718, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The Fair Penitent is an unblushing plagiarism, in respect of its plot and characters, from Massinger's Fatal 1 Cato, Act ii. Sc. 1. 2 Ibid. Act ii. Sc. 5. 3 Ibid. Act iv. Sc. 3.

Dowry, one of the most characteristic plays of that fine and impressive dramatist. Written in an age which had not yet lost the poetry of the old tradition, The Fatal Dowry carries in every line the stamp of its creator's personality. It is the work of a man penetrated with a sense of the corruption of manners in a degenerate court, and determined to hold up before his contemporaries a lofty ideal of thought and action. After Massinger's custom the plot, founded on an incident in Burgundian history, is carefully constructed so as to lead up to the concluding moral. Charalois, a valiant but impoverished gentleman of Burgundy, allows himself to be imprisoned

as he expects for life, in order to procure the burial of his father, a brave marshal, whose body has been seized by his rapacious creditors in consequence of Charalois' inability to discharge his father's debts. Struck by his filial piety, Rochfort, chief justice of the Parliament, satisfies the marshal's creditors, makes Charalois his heir, and bestows on him in marriage the hand of his daughter, Beaumelle. Beaumelle, however, has been corrupted by the fashionable immorality of the day, and, being in love with a certain Novali, keeps up a secret intrigue with him, as her cavalier servente, after her marriage. Charalois discovers the adultery, and having killed Novali in a duel, refers the conduct of his wife for judgment to Rochfort, her father, by whom she is pronounced guilty, and acknowledging the justice of her sentence, is put to death by her husband. The latter is himself brought to trial for killing Novali. Though acquitted by the Court, he is almost immediately stabbed by a friend of Novali, and dies, admitting that he is justly punished by Heaven for making himself the private prosecutor of crimes that ought to have been avenged by the law.

Such was the treatment of the story in the hands of a truly dramatic poet. Though the incidents of the play, as is common with Massinger, are somewhat violent, each stage of the action is most carefully thought out; the characters are vividly conceived and represented; and the