Many critics of the age regarded the heroic tragedy with no more respect than we are apt to do now. Dryden replied with arguments which are not quite to the point. The heroic tragedy is a perfectly legitimate form of art; the Greek tragedies deal with divine heroes and gods, and Æschylus in "The Persians" does not disdain the ghost of Darius, and in "The Eumenides" introduces the Furies. Dryden pleaded for a similar licence in the heroic play, but all depends on the manner of the doing. His ghosts are not majestic, like that of Darius; they are absurd. For boldness of language he also claimed a privilege; persons engaged in superhuman struggles may talk above the pitch of ordinary men. But they must not, like the heroes of the Caroline tragedies, soar or slip into bombast; they must rise on the wings of poetry, not on bladders full of gas. "Are all the flights of heroic poetry to be concluded bombast, unnatural, and mere madness because they," the critics, "are not affected by their excellences?" asks Dryden, in his "Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence". "No, not all," the critics might have answered, "but many of _your_ flights of heroic poetry are bombast"; and they might, indeed they did, produce examples. For instance, in his "The State of Innocence," in which, accepting Milton's permission given in blank verse, Ay, you may tag my verses if you will, he rhymed "Paradise Lost" into an opera, Dryden wrote thus:-- Seraph and cherub, careless of their charge, And wanton, in full ease, who live at large, Unguarded leave the passes of the sky, And all dissolved in hallelujahs lie. The spectacle of wanton seraphs lying dissolved in hallelujahs naturally provoked laughter, but Glorious John did not see the absurdity of the situation. He took his image from Virgil, he says, where the Greeks enter Troy which "lay buried in sleep and wine". But Trojans were not seraphs, and sleep and wine are not dissolving hallelujahs. In the same way Virgil, following Homer, describes the Cyclops as a monster of mountainous height, as in fact he was. Goliath was only about ten feet high. But Dryden applauds Cowley for writing of Goliath-- The valley, now, this monster seemed to fill, And we, methought, looked up to him from our hill.