Though Dryden avoided any extended public argument with Rymer, he obviously knew both the _Short View_ and Dacier's Aristotle. In the _Parallel of Poetry and Painting_ (1695), he followed Rymer's lead in equating Dacier, the critic of tragedy ("in his late excellent Translation of Aristotle and his notes upon him"[11]) with Le Bossu, the framer of "exact rules for the Epic Poem...." But he disagreed with Dacier's opinions on the chorus and explained away Racine's use of it on the sensible grounds that _Esther_ had not been written for public, but for private performances which gave occasion to the young ladies of St. Cyr "of entertaining the king with vocal music, and of commending their voices."[12] He also suggested the practical consideration that plays with choruses would bankrupt any company of actors because it would be necessary to provide a number of costumes for the additional players and to enlarge the stage (and consequently the theater) to make room for the choral dances. Dacier's insistence that the primary function of poetry is to instruct and that pleasure is merely an aid to that end could easily be distorted into a crudely moralistic view of the art. Doubtless it was this that recommended the treatise to minor critics and poets who were creating the atmosphere out of which came Jeremy Collier's attack on contemporary dramatists in 1698. Blackmore's preface to _Prince Arthur_ (1695) is a long plea for the reformation of poetry, whose "true and genuine End is, by universal Confession, the Instruction of our Minds and Regulation of our Manners...." One is not surprised, when toward the end he names his authorities, that they turn out to be Rapin, Le Bossu, Dacier (as commentators on Aristotle and Horace) and "our own _excellent Critick, Mr. Rymer_."[13] W.J. who translated Le Bossu in 1695, dedicated his work to Blackmore. In his preface he linked Blackmore and Dacier as proponents of the thesis that poetry's "true Use and End is to instruct and profit the world more than to delight and please it."[14] And Jeremy Collier himself quoted Dacier from time to time, and on one occasion invoked his commentary on Horace, "_The Theater condemned as inconsistent with Prudence and Religion_," as one of many answers to the unrepentant Congreve.[15]