/$ Yet forth the blood flow'd, which did much his royal person grace, And show'd upon his ivory skin, as doth a purple dye Laid, by a dame of Caïra, or lovely Maeony, On ivory, wrought in ornaments to deck the cheeks of horse; Which in her marriage room must lie; whose beauties have such force, That they are wish'd of many knights, but are such precious things, That they are kept for horse that draw the chariots of kings; Which horse, so deck'd, the charioteer esteems a grace to him; Like these, in grace, the blood upon thy solid thighs did swim, O Menelaus, etc[107]. $/ (_γ_) A _third_ motive cause of similes, quite distinct from that of purely imaginative riot as also the self-absorbed sentiment or, under its other aspect, the dallying round important objects with the figurative power of the fancy, we have now to emphasize with particular reference to dramatic poetry. The content of the drama is made up of the conflict of passions, activities, pathos, actions, and the accomplishment of the thing willed by the soul, a content which does not, as in the case of the epic, take the form of a narrative of past events, but the dramatic poet places the individuals themselves before our eyes and makes them unfold their emotions personally in an objective form, and their actions as taking place in the present: his mediate position between ourselves and the objects represented therefore ceases. Looked at from this point of view it would appear as though in order to make this presence in Nature clear to us a primary requirement of drama would be that the expression of passions and the vehemence of their grief, consternation, and delight should be painted as naturally as it was possible to paint it, and consequently the simile would be here out of place. To let individuals, on the very plane of their action, in the full storm of emotion, and in the continuous strain of the busy world, speak much in the language of metaphor or image is obviously, from the commonsense point of view, an unnatural proceeding and injurious to the directness aimed at. We are by the simile diverted from the immediate situation, and the characters, whose actions and emotions are involved in it, to something external and strange to it, which in short does not strictly belong to it, as part of its own present; consequently the general course of the dialogue must unavoidably appear to lag under the interruption thus imposed. And for this reason it came about also in Germany when at last our young bloods were all for freeing themselves from the fetters of French rhetorical taste, that the Spaniards, Italians, and French were regarded as artists who did nothing more than place their own personal flights of fancy or witticism, their own conventional attitude to society and elegance of speech in the mouth of their dramatic characters in situations, too, when the very tempest of emotion cried