The butt of "The Rehearsal," Bayes, a mixture of Davenant with the mannerisms of Dryden, keeps bragging that this or that absurdity is "new". "New," certainly, and not worthy to wax old, was the extravagant "heroic" tragedy, copying the flights of the French school of bombastic romances, and written in rhyming couplets. The authors of "The Rehearsal" stitch together scraps and parodies of the new plays, in that which is being rehearsed, with plenty of farcical "business" under Mr. Bayes, who gives amusing snatches of his "Ars Poetica," while there are gibes at the new style of prologues and epilogues, which Dryden wrote so copiously. But "The Rehearsal" is less witty than Sheridan's "The Critic". As for the "new" rhyming "heroic" plays, Dryden ascribes their origin to Davenant. Forbidden to act the old sort of plays under the Reign of the Saints, he introduced examples of moral virtue, "writ in verse" (in rhyme), "and performed in recitative music". He combined the Italian opera with characters in the manner of Corneille. At the Restoration, he turned his "Siege of Rhodes" into "a just drama," but without "design and variety of characters". Dryden took the manner up, and, inspired by Ariosto, made love and valour the theme of the new heroic tragedy on a superhuman scale, and with supernatural incidents, ghosts for example. Then came rant and extravagance expressed in rhymed couplets, and even triplets, till Dryden returned to blank verse, and Lee and Otway and others followed him. But the drama remained as heroic and absurd as when Dryden wrote that masterpiece "The Conquest of Granada". In this he has a ghost, the ghost of the mother of the heroic Almanzor. Scott supposes that she was brought in to prove the courage of her son, even in face of an apparition. Really, the courtesy of Almanzor is more to be admired; the stage direction shows that he bowed to the spectre!