By so much as the chief personages are inferior to their exemplars, by so much also is the puny, starved action of Dryden's tragedy, restricted to one day and seven characters, inferior to the opulence of Shakespeare's, ranging over the Roman world, crowded with personages, and gathering up every trait from Plutarch that could contribute picturesqueness to its prodigality of incident and sentiment. Nor is Dryden entirely successful in the conduct of his plot. The introduction of Octavia is a happy idea, but she appears at too late a period of Antony's history. The implication that his return to her could have availed him in so desperate an extremity is more contrary to historical truth and common reason than any of the anachronisms for which Dryden derides Elizabethan poets. The intrigue by which Dolabella is made to excite Antony's jealousy is more worthy of comedy than of heroic tragedy, besides being inconsistent with the manly character of its promoter, Ventidius. This gallant veteran is indeed a fine creation; too fine, for he sometimes seems to eclipse Antony and Cleopatra both, and assumes more prominence in the action than Shakespeare would have allowed him. Alexas is the hasty and much marred outline of a character which might have been hardly less impressive had Dryden been at the pains to work out the conception adumbrated in the first act. When all these imperfections are admitted, and they should not be passed over in silence after Scott's ill-judged parallel of Dryden's performance with Shakespeare's, it remains true that _All for Love_ is a very fine play, energetic, passionate, and steeped in that atmosphere of nobility which half redeems the literary defects of _The Conquest of Granada_. The poetry is frequently very fine, as in Octavia's speech to Antony, remarkable as perhaps the sole instance of genuine pathos throughout the entire range of Dryden's dramatic writings: 'Look on these; Are they not yours? or stand they thus neglected As they are mine? Go to him, children, go; Kneel to him, take him by the hand, speak to him; For you may speak, and he may own you, too, Without a blush; and so he cannot all His children. Go, I say, and pull him to me, And pull him to yourselves, from that bad woman. You, Agrippina, hang upon his arms; And you, Antonia, clasp about his waist: If he will shake you off, if he will dash you Against the pavement, you must bear it, children, For you are mine, and I was born to suffer.' Antony's sarcasms upon Augustus reveal the ripening satirist of _Absalom and Achitophel_: '_Ant._ Octavius is the minion of blind chance, But holds from virtue nothing. _Vent._ Has he courage?