The beauties which are thickly sown throughout _The Conquest of Granada_ owe, perhaps, something of their effect as poetry to the utter want of nature in the characters and of reason in the conduct of the play. In a drama aiming at the delineation of real men and women they would frequently have appeared absurdly inappropriate, but when it is once understood that the personages are the puppets and mouthpieces of the author, the question of dramatic propriety becomes irrelevant. Yet _The Conquest of Granada_ is something more than a heap of glittering morsels of sentiment and wit. It possesses a unity of feeling which serves as cement for these scattered jewels. The 'kind of generous and noble spirit animating it,' to employ Mr. Saintsbury's just description, maintains the reader at a level above the pitch of ordinary life. When he opens the book he rises, as he closes it he descends. He may laugh, but his amusement is unmingled with contempt; and ever and anon he comes upon the genuine heroic, unsuspected of sham, unspoiled by bombast. The soul of chivalry inspires the lines quoted with just applause by both Scott and Saintsbury: 'Fair though you are As summer mornings, and your eyes more bright Than stars that twinkle on a winter's night; Though you have eloquence to warm and move Cold age and fasting hermits into love; Though Almahide with scorn rewards my care; Yet than to change 'tis nobler to despair. My love's my soul, and that from fate is free, 'Tis that unchanged and deathless part of me.' _Aurengzebe_ (1675), Mr. Saintsbury considers 'in some respects a very noble play.' We should rather have called it an indifferent play with some noble passages more remarkable for eloquence than dramatic propriety. The characters, though by no means subtle or even natural, are better discriminated than in _The Conquest of Granada_; there is much less rant and bustle, yet quite enough to make one cordially echo Indamora's naïve inquiry: 'Are there yet more Morats, more fighting kings?' Nor are choice examples of bathos wanting. Aurengzebe finely says: 'I need not haste the end of life to meet, The precipice is just beneath my feet.' Nourmahal replies: 'Think not my sense of virtue is so small, I'll rather leap down first and break your fall.' The first act opens with a striking couplet: 'The night seems doubled with the fear she brings, And o'er the citadel now spreads her wings.' To which immediately succeeds: 'The morning, as mistaken, turns about, And all her early fires again go out.' Dryden was probably betrayed into these lapses, not so much by mere haste and carelessness, as by the trick of the heroic metre, which in dialogue almost enforces balanced antithesis.