In the midst of the French influence upon English literature, which set in towards the end of the seventeenth century—the only time when Englishmen as a body have shown a readiness to submit to a prescribed code of critical principles—it is not unnatural that the English drama also should copy the French. The imitation, however, was by no means good as such. The English tragedy of the Restoration aims at being “heroic” tragedy, turns declamation into rant and bombast, and ideal character into impossible perfection. Fortunately the copying in this region was of comparatively brief duration. Of those whom it affected Dryden was the least guilty. He came to a theatre which had been but newly opened under Charles II, after the Puritan tyranny, and, as with everything else under Charles, the theatre endeavoured to take its tone from France. Dryden had himself been largely influenced by French critical ideas. He did not, it is true, agree entirely with the French principles; nevertheless, he found submission necessary. On the one side he had before him the magnificent “romantic” and “irregular” drama of Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans, on the other the new heroic and “regular” tragedies of France. He attempted to combine the better elements of both, and failed through falling between two stools. That he was conscious of a deliberate choice is clear from his own words: “Let any man, who understands English, read diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in sense—many of their plots were made up of some ridiculous incoherent story.” He mentions in particular _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, _Winter’s Tale_, and _Measure for Measure_, and he goes on to quote the classical rules concerning unity of action, with its “beginning, middle, and end,” and the rest; and thereto he adds as his authorities the names of French critics of the school of Boileau, the now unremembered Bossu and Rapin. He does not, indeed, admire the French coldness and monotony, and his own object, though not that of his contemporaries, was, as has been already stated, to combine the better elements of both the French and English style. It is a grief to note that, in keeping with this view, it was thought no literary sin at this time to mutilate and adapt the plays of Shakespeare till they more or less suited the current taste. Dryden’s own dramas, _Tyrannic Love_, _Secret Love_, _Aurengzebe_, and the _Conquest of Granada_ are largely indebted to French originals, and have fallen between the two stools. Whereas Shakespeare and Corneille alike survive, no one now can act, and very few care to read, the plays of Dryden. Another play which is of some repute, the _Cato_ of Addison, would certainly either not have been written, or would have been a less cold and declamatory thing than it is, if Addison had not lived in an age when France was England’s teacher in