over all opposition. This spectacle naturally gratified a prince
to whose family the opposition of Parliaments had been so fatal.
Politeness was his solitary good quality. The insults which he
had suffered in Scotland had taught him to prize it. The
effeminacy and apathy of his disposition fitted him to excel in
it. The elegance and vivacity of the French manners fascinated
him. With the political maxims and the social habits of his
favourite people, he adopted their taste in composition, and,
when seated on the throne, soon rendered it fashionable, partly
by direct patronage, but still more by that contemptible policy,
which, for a time, made England the last of the nations, and
raised Louis the Fourteenth to a height of power and fame, such
as no French sovereign had ever before attained.

It was to please Charles that rhyme was first introduced into our
plays. Thus, a rising blow, which would at any time have been
mortal, was dealt to the English Drama, then just recovering from
its languishing condition. Two detestable manners, the
indigenous and the imported, were now in a state of alternate
conflict and amalgamation. The bombastic meanness of the new
style was blended with the ingenious absurdity of the old; and
the mixture produced something which the world had never before
seen, and which, we hope, it will never see again,--something, by
the side of which the worst nonsense of all other ages appears to
advantage--something, which those who have attempted to
caricature it have, against their will, been forced to flatter--
of which the tragedy of Bayes is a very favourable specimen.
What Lord Dorset observed to Edward Howard might have been
addressed to almost all his contemporaries--