Any number of speeches of this sort are to be found in the heroical dramas of Dryden, Settle, Lee, and their contemporaries. Roman, Arab, Turk, Greek or Moorish heroes, pirates or princes, when they mean to set anything at defiance, choose nothing less than heaven and earth as their object; they divide the world between them as if it were an orange; they rush to the fight or stop for a speech with a fine shake of the head which sends a majestic undulation round the wig worn by them, even by the Moors, as we may see in one of the very rare dramas then published with engravings. They are represented there with embroidered justaucorps, wigs and ribbons.[349] Crowne besides his romance wrote several dramas that secured him a wide, if temporary, popularity. He also adapted Racine's "Andromaque" for the English stage, but he was very much disgusted with this work; the French original, though not "the worst" of French plays, was after all so mean and tame! "If the play be barren of fancy, you must blame the original author. I am as much inclined to be civil to strangers as any man; but then they must be strangers of merit. I would no more be at the pains to bestow wit (if I had any) on a French play, than I would be at the cost to bestow cloaths on every shabby Frenchman that comes over." Here we have Racine put in his proper place; what claim had he to be considered "a stranger of merit"? True, some crabbed English critics seem to have taken his part against the translator, and, incredible as it may seem, they have expressed a thought that "this suffered much in the translation.--I cannot tell in what," answers Crowne, "except in not bestowing verse upon it, which I thought it did not deserve. For otherwise, there is all that is in the French play, verbatim, and something more, as may be seen in the last act, where what is dully recited in the French play is there represented, which is no small advantage."[350] And true, it is, Pyrrhus is slain before our eyes; there are "alarums" and other lively, if customary, ornaments.