were driven in their efforts to keep up the appearance of obedience to the Unity of Place: "The street, the window, the two houses and the closet are made to walk about, and the persons to stand still."] When the two leading masters of the 'Classical Drama', the French and the English, joined hands to cast doubt upon the sacred unities, its opponents might well feel easy as to the ultimate issue of the dispute. Dryden was not the man to bound his argument by any technical question, even when it touched a point so fundamental as the unities. Nothing is more remarkable in the _Essay_, as indeed in all his critical work, than the wide range which he gives to the discussion. And never has the case against--we can hardly add, for--the French drama been stated more pointedly than by him. His main charge, as was to be expected, is against its monotony, and, in close connection with that, against its neglect of action and its preference for declamation. Having defined the drama as "a just and lively image of human nature, in its actions, passions and traverses of fortune", [Footnote: _English Garner_, iii 513, ib. 567] he proceeds to test the claims of the French stage by that standard. Its characters, he finds, are wanting in variety and nature. Its range of passion and humour is lamentably narrow. [Footnote: Ib. 542-4.] Its declamations "tire us with their length; so that, instead of grieving for their imaginary heroes, we are concerned for our own trouble, as we are in the tedious visits of bad company; we are in pain till they are gone". [Footnote: English Garner, iil 542.] The best tragedies of the French--_Cinna and Pompey_--"are not so properly to be called Plays as long discourses of Reason of State". [Footnote: Ib. 543.] Upon their avoidance of action he is hardly less severe. "If we are to be blamed for showing too much of the action"--one is involuntarily reminded of the closing scene of _Tyrannic Love_ and of the gibes in _The Rehearsal_--"the French are as faulty for discovering too little of it ". [Footnote: Ib. 545.] Finally, on a comparison between the French dramatists and the Elizabethans, Dryden concludes that "in most of the irregular Plays of Shakespeare or Fletcher ... there is a more masculine fancy, and greater spirit in all the writing, than there is in any of the French". [Footnote: Ib. 548.]