us.

Of a very different order is the important critical treatise which comes
next, Dryden's _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, to which are prefixed as
prolegomena Dryden's _Dedicatory Epistle to The Rival Ladies_, Sir Robert
Howard's _Preface to Four New Plays_, and, as supplementary, Howard's
_Preface to The Duke of Lerma_, and Dryden's _Defence of the Essay of
Dramatic Poesy_. As Dryden's _Essay_, like almost all his writings, both
in verse and prose, was of a more or less occasional character, it will
be necessary to explain at some length the origin of the controversy out
of which it sprang, as well as the immediate object with which it was
written.

The Restoration found Dryden a literary adventurer, with a very slender
patrimony and with no prospects. Poetry was a drug in the market;
hack-work for the booksellers was not to his taste; and the only chance
of remunerative employment open to him was to write for the stage. To
this he accordingly betook himself. He began with comedy, and his comedy
was a failure. He then betook himself to a species of drama, for which
his parts and accomplishments were better fitted. Dryden had few or none
of the qualifications essential in a great dramatist; but as a
rhetorician, in the more comprehensive sense of the term, he was soon to
be unrivalled. In the rhymed heroic plays, as they were called, he found
just the sphere in which he was most qualified to excel. The taste for
these dramas, which owed most to France and something to Italy and Spain,
had come in with the Restoration. Their chief peculiarities were the
complete subordination of the dramatic to the rhetorical element, the
predominance of pageant, and the substitution of rhymed for blank verse.
Dryden's first experiment in this drama was the _Rival Ladies_, in which
the tragic portions are composed in rhyme, blank verse being reserved for