It is alleged, however, that the French drama had at this time (Scott says through the French taste of Charles II.) a baneful influence upon our own. But I cannot assent to this position. I believe rather that its influence was salutary, seeing that our drama never lost its own pronounced national character. On Dryden's earlier manner indeed, the fashionable French (or old Latin) declamation, casuistical debates about passion, and academic coldness may have been somewhat injurious. But this is a note rather of Dryden's idiosyncrasy than that of a school, like his neatly-turned, sense-isolating couplets--mannerisms shaken off by Dryden himself in his later plays.[1] Who can be less French than Lee? Otway also is perfectly free from these faults; nor, except in his earliest play, _Alcibiades_, is there any of Dryden's rant and bombast. His fable, indeed, is classical in its simplicity and skilful development; his concentration on some one motive of action, involving the utmost intensity of feeling, is unsurpassed; his movement fierce and rapid; and that without sacrificing underplot, or the grotesque element characteristic of the romantic drama, as written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Nor can I grant that such concentration and unity of interest, derived from classical examples, was otherwise than a reform much needed in our romantic tragedy--seeing it entailed no languor or frigidity borrowed from Seneca, or the courtly decorum of a French academy. On the extravagant Gothic _fougue_ and fury of our native stage, characterised by its bad artistic form, and tumid, fantastic diction, classical influence of the right kind was purely salutary--granting, of course, the presence of original genius, lacking, for instance, in Addison's _Cato_--although I fully admit with Schlegel that in the most perfect Shakespearean examples of romantic drama the virtues of ancient and modern poetry are combined. Mr. J. A. Symonds is unquestionably justified in his strictures on Marlowe's learned predecessors, Norton, Hughes, Sackville and Daniel as "pseudo-classical" in _Gorboduc_, and elsewhere. But then they followed the bad example of Seneca and his Italian imitators. Dryden and Otway returned to more legitimate classical methods.