Page:An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.djvu/13

ix assumed the poet's lyre or the critic's stylus with an air of superiority which showed that he thought it a real condescension in himself, a man of fashion, to herd with the poverty-stricken tribe of authors. This tone is very noticeable in the Preface to The Duke of Lerma, which Dryden answered in his Defence of the Essay. Sir Charles Sedley was a well-known Kentish baronet, and Lord Buckhurst, soon to be the Earl of Dorset, was heir to the illustrious house of Sackville. It is perhaps in contrast to the social distinction of his friends that Dryden modestly calls himself 'Neander,' which may be taken to represent 'novus homo,' a man of the people, desiring to rise above his station.

This question as to the value of rhyme in dramatic poetry is by no means an obsolete or unprofitable inquiry; it still exercises our minds in the nineteenth century; it has received no permanent, no authoritative solution. It is usually assumed that Dryden was altogether wrong in preferring the heroic couplet to blank verse as the metre of serious dramas; and his own subsequent abandonment of rhyme—foreshadowed, as we have seen, in the prologue to Aurung-zebe—is regarded as an admission that his argument in favour of it was unsound. And yet much of what he says in defence of rhyme appears to be plain common sense and incontrovertible, and to deserve, whatever his later practice may have been, a careful consideration. After all, if the heroic rhyming plays of Dryden, Lee, and Etherege have found no successors, has not blank verse also notoriously failed, however able the hands which wielded it, to