'And shall the daughter of Darius hold him? That puny girl? that ape of my ambition, That cried for milk when I was nursed in blood? Shall she, made up of watery element, Ascend, shall she embrace my proper God, While I am cast like lightning from his hand? No, I must scorn to prey on common things. Though hurled to earth by this disdainful Jove, I will rebound to my own orb of fire, And with the wrack of all the heavens expire.' Even when the thought is dignified and noble, it frequently loses dramatic propriety from want of keeping with the speaker or the situation: 'Therefore, my friend, Let us despise the torrent of the world, Fortune, I mean, and dam her up with fences, Banks, bulwarks, all the fortresses which virtue, Resolved and manned like ours, can raise against her: That, if she does o'erflow, she may at least Bring but half ruin to our great designs; That being at last ashamed of her own weakness, Like a low-baséd flood, she may retire To her own bounds, and we with pride o'erlook her.' Into what Cato's mouth has Lee put this deliverance of Stoic dignity? Truly, into Cæsar Borgia's. Machiavelli having been privy to all Borgia's villainies, is selected to pronounce the moral of the play: 'No power is safe, nor no religion good, Whose principles of growth are laid in blood.' A proposition supposed to have been irrefragably established by five acts full of poniards and poisons. This childish want of nature Lee shares with most of the tragic dramatists of the Restoration period. He is mainly glare and gewgaw, and seldom succeeds but in those scenes of passion and frenzy where extravagant declamation seems a natural language. There is little to remark on his dramatic economy, which is that of the French classical drama. His characters are boldly outlined and strongly coloured, but transferred direct from history to the stage, or wholly conventional. His merit is to have been really a poet. 'There is an infinite fire in his works,' says Addison, 'but so involved in smoke that it does not appear in half its lustre.' The following scene from _Mithridates_ is a fair example of the mingled beauties and blemishes of his tragic style: '_Ziph._ Farewell, Semandra; O, if my father should Fall back from virtue, ('tis an impious thought!) Yet I must ask you, could you in my absence, Solicited by power and charming empire, And threaten'd too by death, forget your vows? Could you, I say, abandon poor Ziphares, Who midst of wounds and death would think on you; And whatsoe'er calamity should come, Would keep his love sacred to his Semandra, Like balm, to heal the heaviest misfortune?