Lord Orrery, in deference, as he declares, to the expressed tastes of his sovereign King Charles II. himself, was the first to set up the standard of _heroic plays_.[211] This new species of tragedy (for such it professed to be) commended itself by its novel choice of themes, to a large extent supplied by recent French romance--the _romans de longue haleine_ of the Scudérys and their contemporaries--and by French plays treating similar themes. It likewise borrowed from France that garb of rhyme which the English drama had so long abandoned, and which now reappeared in the heroic couplet. But the themes which to readers of novels might seem of their nature inexhaustible could not long suffice to satisfy the more capricious appetite of theatrical audiences; and the form, in the application which it was more or less sought to enforce for it, was doomed to remain an exotic. In conjunction with his brother-in-law Sir R. Howard,[212] and afterwards more confidently by himself,[213] Dryden threw the incomparable vigour and brilliancy of his genius into the scale, which soon rose to the full height of fashionable popularity. At first he claimed for English tragedy the right to combine her native inheritance of freedom with these valuable foreign acquisitions.[214] Nor was he dismayed by the ridicule which the celebrated burlesque (by the duke of Buckingham and others) of _The Rehearsal_ (1671) cast upon heroic plays, without discriminating between them and such other materials for ridicule as the contemporary drama supplied to its facetious authors, but returned[215] to the defence of a species which he was himself in the end to abandon.[216] The desire for change proved stronger than the love of consistency--which in Dryden was never more than theoretical. After summoning tragedy to rival the freedom (without disdaining the machinery) of opera--with whose birth its own revival was as a matter of fact simultaneous--he came to recognize in characterization the truest secret of the master-spirit of the Elizabethan drama,[217] and after audaciously, but in one instance not altogether unhappily, essaying to rival Shakespeare on his own ground,[218] produced under the influence of the same views at least one work of striking merit.[219] But he was already growing weary of the stage itself as well as of the rhymed heroic drama; and, though he put an end to the species to which he had given temporary vitality, he failed effectively to point the way to a more legitimate development of English tragedy. Among the other tragic poets of this period, N. Lee, in the outward form of his dramas, accommodated his practice to that of Dryden, with whom he occasionally co-operated as a dramatist, and like whom he allowed political partisanship to intrude upon the stage.[220] His rhetorical genius was not devoid of genuine energy, nor is he to be regarded as a mere imitator. T. Otway, the most gifted tragic poet of