grosser forms of this fallacy Dryden's fine sense was enough to save
him. Indeed, in the remarks on Jonson's comedies that immediately
follow, he expressly rejects them; and seldom does he show a more
nicely balanced judgment than in what he there says on the limits of
imitation in the field of art. But in the passage before us--in his
assertion that "the converse must be heightened with all the arts and
ornaments of poetry"--it is hard to resist a vision of the dramatist
first writing his dialogue in bald and skimble-skamble prose, and then
wringing his brains to adorn it "with all the arts" of the dramatic
_gradus_. Here again we have the seeds of the fatal theory which
dominated the criticism and perverted the art of the eighteenth century;
the theory which, finding in outward form the only distinction between
prose and poetry, was logically led to look for the special themes of
poetic art in the dissecting-room or the pulpit, and was driven to
mark the difference by an outrageous diction that could only be called
poetry on the principle that it certainly was not prose; the theory
which at length received its death-blow from the joint attack of
Wordsworth and Coleridge.

It remains only to note the practical issue of the battle of the metres.
In the drama the triumph of the heroic couplet was for the moment
complete; but it was short-lived. By 1675, the date of _Aurungzebe_,
Dryden proclaimed himself already about to "weary of his long-loved
mistress, Rhyme"; and his subsequent plays were all written in blank
verse or prose. But the desertion of "his mistress" brought him little
luck; and the rest of his tragedies show a marked falling off in that
splendid vigour which went far to redeem even the grossest absurdities
of his heroic plays. A more sensitive, though a weaker, genius joined
him in the rejection of rhyme; and the example of Otway--whose two
crucial plays belong to 1680 and 1682--did perhaps more than that of