[Footnote: English Garner,
iil 542.] The best tragedies of the French--_Cinna and Pompey_--"are
not so properly to be called Plays as long discourses of Reason of
State". [Footnote: Ib. 543.] Upon their avoidance of action he is
hardly less severe. "If we are to be blamed for showing too much of
the action"--one is involuntarily reminded of the closing scene of
_Tyrannic Love_ and of the gibes in _The Rehearsal_--"the French are
as faulty for discovering too little of it ". [Footnote: Ib. 545.]
Finally, on a comparison between the French dramatists and the
Elizabethans, Dryden concludes that "in most of the irregular Plays
of Shakespeare or Fletcher ... there is a more masculine fancy, and
greater spirit in all the writing, than there is in any of the French".
[Footnote: Ib. 548.]
Given the definition with which he starts--but it is a definition that
no Frenchman of the seventeenth or eighteenth century would have
admitted--it is hard to see how Dryden could have reached a
substantially different result. Nor, if comparisons of this sort are
to be made at all, is there much--so far, at least, as Shakespeare is
concerned--to find fault with in the verdict with which he closes.
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