Barry, however, and the constancy of his seven years' affection for her, seem to indicate a natural refinement of feeling, and if there is truth in the dictum, 'He best can paint them, who can feel them most,' the creator of Monimia and Belvidera must have been endowed with a heart tender in no common degree. 'He was,' we are told, 'of middle size, inclinable to corpulency, had thoughtful, yet lively, and as it were speaking eyes.' Otway's reputation rests entirely on his two great performances, _The Orphan_ and _Venice Preserved_. His other plays deserve no special notice, although _Don Carlos_, which is said to have for many years attracted larger audiences than either of his masterpieces, might have been a good play if it had not been written in rhyme. The action is highly dramatic, and the characters, though artless, are not ineffective; but the pathos in which the poet excelled is continually disturbed by the bombastic couplets, ever trembling on the brink of the ridiculous. The remorse of Philip after the murder of his wife and son is as grotesque an instance of the forcible feeble as could easily be found, and is a melancholy instance indeed of the declension of the English drama, when contrasted with the demeanour of Othello in similar circumstances. Otway, however, was yet to show that his faults were rather his age's than his own. The fashion of rhyme must have had much to do with the bombast of _Don Carlos_, for in _The Orphan_, his next effort in serious tragedy, there is hardly any rant, even when the situation might have seemed to have excused the exaggerated expression of emotion. The central incident of this admirable tragedy--the deception of a maiden beloved by two brothers, through the personation of the favoured one by his rival--seems now to be held to exclude it from the stage. The objection would probably prove to be imaginary, for the play was performed as late as 1819, when no less an actress than Miss O'Neill represented Monimia, and the diction is in general of quite exemplary propriety for a play of the period. Its principal defect as a work of art is that the pathos springs almost solely from the situation, and that the personages have hardly any hold upon our sympathies except as sufferers from an unhappy fatality. So powerful is the situation, nevertheless, that the sorrows of Castalio and Monimia can never fail to move; the poet's language, too, is at its best, simpler and more remote from extravagance than even in _Venice Preserved_. The description of the old hag is justly celebrated: