Thou best of thieves, who with an easy key Dost open life, and, unperceived by us, Even steal us from ourselves.... Haste, bare my arm, and rouse the serpent’s fury. [_Holds out her arm, and draws it back._ Coward flesh, Wouldst thou conspire with Cæsar to betray me, As thou wert none of mine? I’ll force thee to it, And not be sent by him, But bring, myself, my soul to Antony. [_Turns aside, and then shows her arm bloody._ Take hence; the work is done.... _Charmion._ The next is ours. _Iras._ Now, Charmion, to be worthy Of our great queen and mistress. [_They apply the aspics._ _Cleopatra._ Already, death, I feel thee in my veins: I go with such a will to find my lord, That we shall quickly meet. A heavy numbness creeps through every limb, And now ’tis at my head: my eyelids fall, And my dear love is vanquished in a mist. Where shall I find him, where? O turn me to him, And lay me on his breast! Cæsar, thy worst; Now part us, if thou canst. [_Dies._ [_Iras sinks down at her feet, and dies; Charmion stands behind her chair, as dressing her head._ After the Revolution he wrote _Don Sebastian_ (1690), _Cleomenes_ (1691), and _Love Triumphant_ (1694). The last was a tragi-comedy and a failure. The other two, however, were quite up to the average of his plays. In addition, at various stages of his career he collaborated with Lee in two other tragedies, and attempted, with lamentable results, to improve upon Shakespeare’s _Tempest_ and _Troilus and Cressida_. =4. His Prose.= Dryden’s versatility is apparent when we observe that in prose, as well as in poetry and drama, he attains to primacy in his generation. In the case of prose he has one rival, John Bunyan. No single item of Dryden’s prose work is of very great length; but in his _Essay of Dramatic Poesie_ (1668), in his numerous dedicatory epistles and prefaces, and in the scanty stock of his surviving letters we have a prose _corpus_ of some magnitude. The general subject of his prose is literary criticism, and that of a sane and vigorous quality. The style is free, but not too free; there are slips of grammar, but they are not many. The _Essay of Dramatic Poesie_ is his longest single prose work. It is cast into dialogue form, in which four characters, one of whom is Dryden himself, discuss such well-worked themes as ancients _versus_ moderns and blank verse _versus_ rhyme. Studded throughout the book are passages of rare ability, one of which is the following, which illustrates not only his prose style, but also his acute perception of literary values: