the younger generation contemporary with Dryden, inherited something of the spirit of the Elizabethan drama; he possessed a real gift of tragic pathos and melting tenderness; but his genius had a worse alloy than stageyness, and, though he was often happy in his novel choice of themes, his most successful efforts fail to satisfy tests supplementary to that of the stage.[221] Among dramatists who contributed to the vogue of the "heroic" play may be mentioned J. Bankes, J. Weston, C. Hopkins, E. Cooke, R. Gould, S. Pordage, T. Rymer and Elkanah Settle. The productivity of J. Crowne (d. c. 1703)[222] covers part of the earlier period as well as of the later, to which properly belong T. Southerne, a writer gifted with much pathetic power, but probably chiefly indebted for his long-lived popularity to his skill in the discovery of "sensational" plots; and Lord Lansdowne ("Granville the polite") (c. 1667-1735). Congreve, by virtue of a single long celebrated but not really remarkable tragedy,[223] and N. Rowe, may be further singled out from the list of the tragic dramatists of this period, many of whom were, like their comic contemporaries, mere translators or adapters from the French. The tragedies of Rowe, whose direct services to the study of Shakespeare deserve remembrance, indicate with singular distinctness the transition from the fuller declamatory style of Dryden to the calmer and thinner manner of Addison.[224] In tragedy (as to a more marked degree in comedy) the excesses (both of style and subject) of the past period of the English drama had produced an inevitable reaction; decorum was asserting its claims on the stage as in society; and French tragedy had set the example of sacrificing what passion--and what vigour--it retained in favour of qualities more acceptable to the "reformed" court of Louis XIV. Addison, in allowing his _Cato_ to take its chance upon the stage, when a moment of political excitement (April 1713) ensured to it an extraordinary success, to which no feature in it corresponds, except an unusual number of lines predestined to become familiar quotations, unconsciously sealed the doom of English national tragedy. The "first reasonable English tragedy," as Voltaire called it, had been produced, and the oscillations of the tragic drama of the Restoration were at an end. Comedy.