The chronological list of Rowe's dramas runs as follows: _The Ambitious Step-mother_ (1700); _Tamerlane_ (1702); _The Fair Penitent_ (1703); _Ulysses_ (1705); _The Royal Convert_ (1707); the _Tragedy of Jane Shore_ (1714); and the _Tragedy of Lady Jane Grey_ (1715). Measured by his contemporary dramatists he is a distinguished playwright. His characters do not live, but he could invent effective scenes, though in some cases the poet's taste may be questioned. For many years _Tamerlane_ was acted at Drury Lane on the anniversary of King William's landing in England, and under the names of Tamerlane and Bajazet the king is belauded at the expense of Louis XIV. _The Fair Penitent_, a piece even more successful upon the stage, will still please the reader, though he may question the high eulogium of Johnson, that "scarcely any work of any poet is at once so interesting by the fable, and so delightful by the language." Rowe has not the tragic power which can express passion without rant, and pathos without extravagance. In _The Fair Penitent_ Calista gives utterance to her feelings by piling up expletives. Thus, when her husband attacks the lover who has ruined her, she exclaims, 'Destruction! fury! sorrow! shame! and death!' and, on another occasion, she cries out, 'Madness! confusion!' words which give a sense of the ludicrous rather than of the tragic; and so also does Calista's last utterance when, addressing Altamont, she says: 'Had I but early known Thy wondrous worth, thou excellent young man We had been happier both--now 'tis too late!' Rowe may be regarded as the principal representative of tragedy in the 'age of Pope,' but his respectable work shows a fatal degeneration from the 'gorgeous tragedy' of the Elizabethans. [Sidenote: Aaron Hill (1684-1749).]