Page:An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.djvu/14

x the vehicle and instrument of an English dramatic school, worthy to be ranked alongside of the great Elizabethans? Since Dryden's, the only supremely excellent plays which English literature has produced are Sheridan's; and these are comedies, and in prose. Coleridge, Young, Addison, Byron, Shelley, Lytton-Bulwer,—all attempted tragedy in blank verse; and none of their tragedies can be said to live. The fact is, that the amazing superiority of Shakspere, lying much more in the matter than in the form of his tragedies, makes us ready to admit at once that blank verse is the proper metre for an English tragedy because he used it. We do not see that the ensemble of the facts of the case,—viz. that no Elizabethan blank verse tragedy, besides those of Shakspere, can be endured on the stage now, and that those of later dramatists have not been successful,—might lead us to the conclusion that Shakspere triumphed rather in spite of blank verse than because of it.

Rhyme is merely one of the devices to which the poetic artist has recourse, for the purpose of making his work attractive and successful. Whether we take style, or metre, or quantity, or rhyme, the source of the pleasure seems to be always the same,—it lies in the victory of that which is formed over the formless, of the orderly over the anarchic,—in the substitution of Cosmos for Chaos,—in the felt contrast between the flat and bald converse of common life, and the measured and coloured speech of the orator or poet. Style belongs to prose; metre, quantity, and rhyme to poetry. Metre is the arrangement of the words and syllables of a