Our author's part of the "Duke of Guise" is important, though not of
great extent, as his scenes contain some of the most striking
political sketches. The debate of the Council of Sixteen, with which
the play opens, was his composition; the whole of the fourth act,
which makes him responsible for the alleged parallel betwixt Guise and
Monmouth, and the ridicule cast upon the sheriffs and citizens of the
popular party, with the first part of the fifth, which implicates him
in vindicating the assassination of Guise. The character and
sentiments of the king, in these scenes, are drawn very closely after
Davila, as the reader will easily see, from the Italian original
subjoined in the notes. That picturesque historian had indeed
anticipated almost all that even a poet could do, in conveying a
portraiture, equally minute and striking, of the stormy period which
he had undertaken to describe; and, had his powers of description been
inferior, it is probable, that Dryden, hampered as he was, by
restraints of prudence and delicacy, would not have chosen to go far
beyond the authority to which he referred the lord chamberlain. The
language of the play, at least in these scenes, seldom rises above
that of the higher tone of historical oratory; and the descriptions
are almost literally taken from Davila, and thrown into beautiful
verse. In the character of Marmoutiere, there seems to be an allusion
to the duchess of Buccleuch and Monmouth, whose influence was always,
and sometimes successfully, used to detach her husband from the
desperate schemes of Shaftesbury and Armstrong. The introduction of
the necromancer, Malicorn, seems to refer to some artifices, by which
the party of Monmouth endeavoured to call to their assistance the
sanction of supernatural powers[3]. The particular story of Malicorn
is said to be taken from a narrative in Rosset's _Histoires
Tragiques_, a work which the present editor has never seen. In the
conference between Malicorn and Melanax, Dryden has made much use of