The only tragic dramatist of the age, after Dryden and Otway, who had any pretension to rank as a poet, was Nathaniel Lee, and his claims are not very high. Notwithstanding his absurd rants, however, there are fire and passion in his verse which lift him out of the class of mere playwrights. After receiving a Cambridge education, Lee came up to town to seek his fortune. Thrown on the world, it is said, by the failure of the Duke of Ormond to redeem his promises of patronage, Lee became an actor, but obtained no success, although celebrated for the beauty of his elocution as a dramatic reader. The transition from actor to author was easy. Lee produced three bad rhyming plays in the taste of the time, and in 1677 did himself more justice in _The Rival Queens_, a tragedy on the history of Alexander the Great, which kept the stage for nearly a century and a half. _Mithridates_ (1678) was also successful, and Dryden thought sufficiently well of Lee to combine with him in the production of an _Oedipus_, which continued to be acted until 1778, when the situation, rather than the diction, was found unendurable. Kemble wished to revive it so late as 1802, but was prevented by the reluctance of Mrs. Siddons. It is true that on a modern stage the piece must want the religious consecration which accompanied it on the Greek. Lee wrote on, enjoying the notoriety of the prohibition by authority of his _Lucius Junius Brutus_, in which allusions, merely imaginary, to the vices of Charles II., were discovered by the Court, and regaining his lost favour by the tragedy of _The Duke of Guise_ (1682), a play full of political allusions, in which also Dryden had a hand. In 1684 he was disabled by an attack of insanity, brought on, it is alleged, by his intemperate habits; and although he recovered sufficiently to be released from confinement, he wrote no more, his last two published plays being compositions of an earlier date. He died miserably in returning from the tavern on a winter's night, fallen down and stifled in the snow. That Lee was a poet, a passage quoted by Mr. Saintsbury would prove, had he written nothing else: 'Thou coward! yet Art living? canst not, wilt not, find the road To the great palace of magnificent death, Though thousand ways lead to his thousand doors, Which day and night are still unbarred for all?' A variation of this thought in Lee's _Theodosius_ might well have inspired Beckford with the conception of his Hall of Eblis, nor would it be difficult to find other impressive passages. Lee's rants of mere sound and fury are unfortunately much more frequent, and his pre-eminence above all competitors in this line is so indisputable, that it is no wonder if he is remembered by his gigantic faults rather than by his comparatively tame and temperate merits. The following speech of Roxana in _The Rival Queens_, for instance, is quite an average specimen of her conversation: