was largely artificial, imitative, and conventional, painted suffering and tenderness with truth to nature, and who violated the accepted rules of his art in order to reach the hearts of his audience. That he could not also escape the moral perversion of taste that marked his time has brought its punishment in the final neglect of his masterpieces; but it is a sign of genius to turn away from heroic plays, Racine, and Shakespeare, to write plays different from any written before, and to stir all men's hearts for over a century. Of the many dramatists who wrote tragedies in the last decade of the seventeenth century and bridged the way from the age of Dryden to the age of Pope, only Banks, Southerne, and Congreve produced plays of continuing popularity and influence through the eighteenth century. Banks ended a prolific career with "Cyrus the Great, or the Tragedy of Love" in 1696, but his popularity was mainly due to his three English historical tragedies, "Virtue Betrayed, or Anne Bullen," "The Island Queens" (Elizabeth and Mary Stuart), and "The Unhappy Favorite" (the Earl of Essex). These plays are interesting as an illustration of the survival on the stage of a dramatic species in a debased form. Though in blank verse, their material is that of the heroic play; their formula, much love-making and a pretense of portentous events; their persons, rivals in love,--two men with the same woman or two women with the same man,--a wicked minister, a revengeful woman, and the queen at the centre of the stage. There is no comedy, no physical horrors, and even the portents are reduced to a peculiar decorum:-- "Last night no sooner was I laid to rest But just three drops of blood fell from my nose." The construction is on French models with few actors, continuity of scenes, and observance of the unities. Puerile in conception and more ridiculous in their bombast than Fielding's burlesque, they have enough rapidity of action, vivacity of claptrap, and extravagance of changing emotions to account for their stage success.