Page:An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.djvu/18

xiv principal authors; but it must be owned that they make no great impression. For this there are indeed other causes;—the wit is not such as amuses at the present day; the passion is rather Italian or Spanish than English;—but it is also true that the story is seldom sufficiently interesting, or the thoughts sufficiently striking, to enchain our attention for their own sakes, apart from the pleasure given by rhyme. On the other hand, in reading such a collection as Mr. Palgrave's Golden Treasury, all of us are conscious of the continued presence of pleasurable feeling. What reason can be found for this difference of impression, except that rhyme,—and often exquisitely managed rhyme,—is present throughout Mr. Palgrave's collection, and absent throughout Lamb's collection? If the English serious drama, expressed in blank verse, had continued to make progress from the beginning of the seventeenth century, and were in a flourishing condition at the present time, Dryden's plea for rhyme, since it might seem to have been disproved by the event, might well be rejected. But the English serious drama at this moment is in such a low condition as to be almost non-existent. It seems therefore to be a question open to argument whether, in spite of the success,—due to exceptional power,—of Hamlet or King Lear, Dryden was not right in holding that the average dramatist could not safely dispense, if he wished permanently to please English audiences, with the music and the charm of rhyme.