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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.


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