The reasons for the almost exclusive adoption of Seneca as a model seem to have been not only the comparative ignorance of Greek, but also the preference of Renaissance taste for the qualities just enumerated. Moreover, these lifeless and undramatic mixtures of rhetorical verbiage, melodramatic situations, and endless declamations had the advantage of being easy to imitate. In their encouragement to imitation and their absorption of interest away from the models of Greek tragedy, there was a danger of humanistic endeavor resulting in mere copying, a danger not altogether escaped in Italy and France, but happily averted in England. When, on the other hand, the characteristics of these unpromising models are considered in comparison with the conventionality of the miracles and moralities, they clearly offered much provocative of literary endeavor and the development of the _genre_ of tragedy. Through them secular stories, real persons, and dramatic plots took the place of the allegories and the abstractions. While they encouraged the selection of such stories as resembled the sensational myths favored by Seneca, they opened the door to history, romance, and the whole world of classical fable. Though their particular structure proved in the end impossible on the English stage, they enforced the division into acts already familiarized in comedy, and suggested the possibility of a dramatic fable in distinction from the miracles' adherence to a narrative one. Again, their presentation of character brought new persons, new motives, and new methods, calling attention to drama not as an exposition of events or as an allegory of life, but as a field for the study of human emotion. Their brilliant if bombastic rhetoric aroused enthusiasm for the drama as literature and poetry; and their reflective and aphoristic style encouraged an effort to elevate tragedy above its too familiar converse with comedy into the realm of austere philosophy. These influences, however, were general. Every particular of Seneca's plays had its sixteenth century imitators.