Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 3.djvu/134

130 tragedy (1701); The British Enchanters (1706), a dramatick poem; and Peleus and Thetis, a masque, written to accompany The Jew of Venice.

The comedies, which he has not printed in his own edition of his works, I never saw; Once a Lover, and always a Lover, is said to be in a great degree indecent and gross. Granville could not admire without bigotry; he copied the wrong as well as the right from his masters, and may be supposed to have learned obscenity from Wycherley, as he learned mythology from Waller.

In his Jew of Venice, as Rowe remarks, the character of Shylock is made comick, and we are prompted to laughter instead of detestation.

It is evident that Heroick Love was written, and presented on the stage, before the death of Dryden. It is a mythological tragedy, upon the Love of Agamemnon and Chryseis, and therefore easily sunk into neglect, though praised in verse by Dryden, and in prose by Pope.

It is concluded by the wise Ulysses with this speech: Fate holds the strings, and men like children move But as they’re led; success is from above. At