former--a revival under a new form of a dispute already waged by the
Elizabethans--leads Dryden to sift the claims of the "heroic drama";
and his treatment of it has the special charm belonging to an author's
defence of his artistic hearth and home. The latter is a theme which,
under some shape or other, will be with us wherever the stage itself
has a place in our life.

This is not the place to discuss at length the origin or the historical
justification of the Heroic Drama. There is perhaps no form of art
that so clearly marks the transition from the Elizabethan age to that
of the Restoration. Transitional it must certainly be called; for, in
all vital points, it stands curiously apart from the other forms of
Restoration literature. It has nothing either of the negative or the
positive qualities, nothing of the close observation and nothing of
the measure and self-restraint, that all feel to be the distinctive
marks of the Restoration temper. On the other hand the heroic drama,
of which Dryden's _Conquest of Granada_ and _Tyrannic Love_ may be
taken as fair samples, has obvious affinities with the more questionable
side of the Elizabethan stage. It may be defined as wanting in all the
virtues and as exaggerating all the vices of the Elizabethan dramatists.
Whatever was most wild in the wildest of the Elizabethan plays--the
involved plots, the extravagant incidents, the swelling metaphors and
similes--all this reappears in the heroic drama. And it reappears
without any of the dramatic force or of the splendid poetry which are
seldom entirely absent from the work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatists. The term "heroic drama" is, in fact, a fraud. The plays
of Dryden and his school are at best but moc-heroic; and they are
essentially undramatic. The truth is that these plays take something
of the same place in the history of the English drama that is held by
the verse of Donne and Cowley in the history of the English lyric. The