Thomson's plays were not esteemed even by his master Voltaire as contributing greatly to that perfection of art possibly attainable by a "due mixture of the French taste and English energy." For, though "wisely intricated and elegantly writ," Voltaire found him, like Addison, lacking in warmth, an "iced genius."[36] Frigid to his contemporaries, the tragedies were long since decently interred. They constitute, nevertheless, the most considerable attempt made by any author of the eighteenth century to conserve the classic theory of tragedy, and they recall nearly every variety of pseudo-classic endeavor. Of classicism it might be said, as of Thomson, that it attempted classic and early English history, that it found in partisan patriotism its favorite theme for rhetoric, that its French rules and taste usually pleased readers better than spectators, but that when it took one of Shakespeare's tragedies as the basis for an infusion of classical theory, or when it was tempered with a love story and a lively action, it triumphed in the theatre. Thomson's friends, Mallet and the versatile and indefatigable Aaron Hill, joined him in his efforts to redeem the tragic muse. Hill's efforts, if no more successful than Thomson's and much less consistent, are at least more amusing. His general theory seems to have been not unlike that which actually controlled theatrical practice; he purposed a combination of French rules with romantic incident, theatrical bustle, and his own inimitable style. His "Fatal Vision, or Fall of Siam" (1716), he boasted, had "a deeper and more surprising plot than any play which has been published, that I know of, in the English tongue; and yet is written in strict observance of the dramatic rules" and affords "room for topical reflections, large description, love, war, show, and passion," and also "a very high regard to decoration." The play is noticeable for its tangle of trite dramatic motives. The emperor's vision is of a son who shall kill him and usurp the throne. The two elder sons are in love with the Princess of Siam. Sworn by her to kill their father, and condemned by him for a murder they did not commit, they die fighting in his behalf. The third son kills the emperor, marries the princess, and ascends the throne. In his rapid advance he is aided by the banished empress, who has returned to court and attained high power, disguised as the favorite eunuch. Hill adapted three of Voltaire's plays, "Zara," "Alzira," and "Merope." To the first he wrote some comic choruses intended to be sung between the acts, and to the third he prefixed his revised and final opinion of Voltaire and French tragedy:--