accepted largely with a view to the need of idealization--the men of
Dryden's day were in no danger of forgetting. The peril with them was
all the other way. The fashion of that age was to treat the arbitrary
usages of the classical theatre as though they were binding for all
time. Thus, of the four men who take part in the dialogue of the
_Essay_, three are emphatically agreed in bowing down before the three
unities as laws of nature. Dryden himself (Neander) is alone in
questioning their divinity: a memorable proof of his critical
independence; but one in which, as he maliciously points out, he was
supported by the greatest of living dramatists. Corneille could not
be suspected of any personal motive for undertaking the defence of
dramatic license. Yet he closed his _Discourse of the Three Unities_
with the admission that he had "learnt by experience how much the
French stage was constrained and bound up by the observance of these
rules, and how many beauties it had sacrificed". [Footnote: Il est
facile aux speculatifs d'etre severes; mais, s'ils voulaient donner
dix ou douze poemes de cette nature au public, ils elargiraient
peut-etre les regles encore plus que je ne sais, si tot qu'ils auraient
reconnu par l'experience quelle contrainte apporte leur exactitude et
combien de belles choses elle bannit de notre theatre--_Troisieme
Discours Euvres_, xii. 326. See Dryden's Essay _English Garner_, iii
546. On the next page is a happy hit at the shifts to which dramatists
were driven in their efforts to keep up the appearance of obedience
to the Unity of Place: "The street, the window, the two houses and the
closet are made to walk about, and the persons to stand still."] When
the two leading masters of the 'Classical Drama', the French and the
English, joined hands to cast doubt upon the sacred unities, its
opponents might well feel easy as to the ultimate issue of the dispute.

Dryden was not the man to bound his argument by any technical question,