It remains only to note the practical issue of the battle of the metres. In the drama the triumph of the heroic couplet was for the moment complete; but it was short-lived. By 1675, the date of _Aurungzebe_, Dryden proclaimed himself already about to "weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme"; and his subsequent plays were all written in blank verse or prose. But the desertion of "his mistress" brought him little luck; and the rest of his tragedies show a marked falling off in that splendid vigour which went far to redeem even the grossest absurdities of his heroic plays. A more sensitive, though a weaker, genius joined him in the rejection of rhyme; and the example of Otway--whose two crucial plays belong to 1680 and 1682--did perhaps more than that of Dryden himself, more even than the assaults of _The Rehearsal_, to discredit the heroic drama. With the appearance of _Venice Preserved_, rhyme ceased to play any part in English tragedy. But at the same time, it must be noted, tragedy itself began to drop from the place which for the last century it had held in English life. From that day to this no acting tragedy, worth serious attention, has been written for the English stage. The reaction against rhyme was not confined to the drama. The epic, indeed--or what in those days passed for such--can hardly be said to have come within its scope. In the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ Dryden--and this is one of the few judgments in which Howard heartily agrees with him--had denounced rhyme as "too low for a poem"; [Footnote: _English Garner_, iii. p. 567.] by which, as the context shows, is meant an epic. This was written the very year in which _Paradise Lost_, with its laconic sneer at rhyme as a device "to set off wretched matter and lame metre", was given to the world. That, however, did not prevent Dryden from asking, and obtaining, leave to "tag its verses" into an opera; [Footnote: The following will serve as a sample of Dryden's improvements on his model:-- Seraph and Cherub, careless of their charge And wanton in full ease, now live at large, Unguarded leave the passes of the sky, And all dissolved in Hallelujahs lie. --_Dramatic Works_, i. p. 596.] nor did it deter Blackmore--and, at a much later time, Wilkie [Footnote: Blackmore's _King Arthur_ was published in 1695; Wilkie's _Epigoniad_--the subject of a patriotic puff from Hume--in 1757.]--from reverting to the metre that Milton had scorned to touch. It is not till the present century that blank verse can be said to have fairly taken seisin of the epic; one of the many services that English poetry owes to the genius of Keats.