Lee is an inferior Otway, but a man of true dramatic genius, with flashes of real poetry. His _Rival Queens_ is one of our excellent tragedies. Southerne has produced at least one genuinely affecting act in his well-constructed drama, _The Fatal Marriage_, akin to Otway, though distinctly inferior. Crowne too was a poet, as is evident from _Thyestes_, in spite of repulsiveness and rant. _Thyestes_ seems to me finer than the _OEdipus_ of Dryden and Lee, which indeed appears to have been written to show how much worse a play than that of Sophocles could be written on the same tremendous theme. But the _Fair Penitent_ and _Mourning Bride_, tragedies by Rowe and Congreve, are surely merely creditable academic exercises, destitute of fire and inspiration. In a lighter vein, Otway could only write some bustling, occasionally funny, dirty, rollicking farces. To call them _comedies_ would be to insult the shades of Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher, Congreve, and Sheridan. On the whole, then, while there is less inexhaustible prodigality, and force of unfettered genius in the Restoration than in the Elizabethan drama, we have still left dramatic energy of high enduring quality, which became, however, nearly extinct in the reigns immediately succeeding. Under Charles, what was good in the romantic movement was still retained; the shifting, many-coloured sheen of vigorous life is yet there, the sun-and-shadow chequer of grave and gay; but classic exemplars have moderated, and moulded the work to finer, more regular form. There is less of exceptional extravagance in the story, less of inconceivable and sudden metamorphosis or distortion in the characters, the unpleasant and bewildering effect in earlier plays being almost as when an acrobat proceeds to walk with long, lithe, serpentine body round his own head; less also of the over-elaborated, misplaced, unveracious ingenuity of so-called poetic diction. One may generously attribute all this to the extravagance of national and literary youth, but the drama of Spain and Italy ought possibly to bear some of the responsibility. At any rate, these are grave defects.