Another queen, making a similar request, assures Theseus that they are-- Rinsing our holy begging in our eyes To make petition clear. Can these ladies, whose sorrow must have been much mitigated by their successful invention of such "precious" hyperboles, stand in need of much commiseration from us? Otway's expression at its best is simple, germane to the situation, vigorous, pregnant with the speaker's emotion, and therefore well calculated to impregnate us with it. In the swift impetuous parts of a play such a diction is certainly best. Only Heywood, so far as I know, among the older dramatists, is equally pure. But I admit that where the action pauses, where it demands reflective soliloquy, Otway and Lee are inferior to their great predecessors. In _Venice Preserved_, and _The Orphan_, the pace is so tremendous, however, that we have hardly leisure to perceive their poverty in that respect. But there are occasions, in _Don Carlos_ especially, where we do feel this inferiority, although the play is one of Otway's finest. Thus, at the beginning of the fifth act, when the king soliloquises on his misery in having lost the love of his bride, there was scope and verge for poetry of reflection, which Beaumont and Fletcher would have given, as well as Shakespeare. Dryden also would have given it, though perhaps of a somewhat coarser grain. This passage in Otway is poor, unworthy the occasion. His versification, moreover, though very good sometimes, is inferior on the whole to that of Dryden. Yet there are some passages of true reflective poetry in Otway, though certainly few and far between. In Southerne they are almost entirely wanting.