Continuing our survey of Dryden's plays, rather according to subject than to chronological order, we arrive at the tragi-comedy of _The Spanish Friar_ (1681), one of the most esteemed of his lighter pieces, but whose praise, we must agree with Mr. Saintsbury, has outstripped its desert. The comic portion is certainly very drastic, but it is not comedy of a high order. It exhibits a distinct declension from _Marriage à la Mode_, where the quartette of _Mitschuldiger_ are well individualized personages. The sinners in _The Spanish Friar_ are of the most ordinary type--a stage rake, a stage coquette, a stage miser, and a stage friar. Dominick is, indeed, exceedingly amusing, but is more farcical than truly comic. He is painted in broad, staring colours, without delicacy of gradation, with the same brush as the author's Morats and Almanzors, only dipped into a different paint. Like so many of Dryden's personages, he is better adapted for the stage than the closet. Every word and gesture would tell in the hands of a good actor, and in Dryden's time the stage was richer in first-class performers than it ever was before, and probably than it has ever been since. Dryden himself, it must be recorded, attached a high value to his piece, and Dryden was an excellent critic of himself as well as of others. The merit on which he lays chief stress, however, is the ingenious blending of the tragic and comic action. 'The tragic part,' says Mr. Churton Collins, 'helps out the comic, and the comic relieves naturally and appropriately the tragic. In this work, tragi-comedy, from an artistic point of view, has achieved perhaps its highest success.' This, however, is the achievement of a playwright; in one passage alone do we find the poet. It is the highly imaginative series of descriptions of the distant noises from the Moorish camp, boding assault to the beleaguered city, of the panic in the city itself, and of the far-off, uncertain battle: 'From the Moorish camp, an hour and more, There has been heard a distant humming noise, Like bees disturbed, and arming in their hives.' 'Never was known a night of such distraction; Noise so confused and dreadful, jostling crowds, That run, and know not whither; torches gliding, Like meteors, by each other in the streets.' 'From the Moors' camp the noise grows louder still: Rattling of armour, trumpets, drums, and atabals; And sometimes peals of shouts that rend the heavens, Like victory; then groans again, and howlings, Like those of vanquished men, but every echo Goes fainter off, and dies in distant sounds.'