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      Oh, my petition was

       Set down in ice, which by hot grief uncandied

       Melts into drops * * * he that will fish

       For my least minnow, let him lead his line

       To catch one at my heart.

      Another queen, making a similar request, assures Theseus that they are—

      Rinsing our holy begging in our eyes

       To make petition clear.

      Can these ladies, whose sorrow must have been much mitigated by their successful invention of such "precious" hyperboles, stand in need of much commiseration from us? Otway's expression at its best is simple, germane to the situation, vigorous, pregnant with the speaker's emotion, and therefore well calculated to impregnate us with it.

      In the swift impetuous parts of a play such a diction is certainly best. Only Heywood, so far as I know, among the older dramatists, is equally pure. But I admit that where the action pauses, where it demands reflective soliloquy, Otway and Lee are inferior to their great predecessors. In Venice Preserved, and The Orphan, the pace is so tremendous, however, that we have hardly leisure to perceive their poverty in that respect. But there are occasions, in Don Carlos especially, where we do feel this inferiority, although the play is one of Otway's finest. Thus, at the beginning of the fifth act, when the king soliloquises on his misery in having lost the love of his bride, there was scope and verge for poetry of reflection, which Beaumont and Fletcher would have given, as well as Shakespeare. Dryden also would have given it, though perhaps of a somewhat coarser grain. This passage in Otway is poor, unworthy the occasion. His versification, moreover, though very good sometimes, is inferior on the whole to that of Dryden. Yet there are some passages of true reflective poetry in Otway, though certainly few and far between. In Southerne they are almost entirely wanting.

      In Don Carlos we note the same want of political and historic sense which we had also to note in Venice Preserved, especially when we compare both plays with the narratives of Saint-Réal, from which they are taken, and which have high merit; or when we compare Otway's with Schiller's Don Carlos, and even with Alfieri's tragedy, Filippo, though the extraordinary concentration of the latter admits of little historic detail. Still Alfieri's Philip is as life-like and graphic a study of individuality as that of Saint-Réal, or Schiller; whereas the Philip of Otway makes no pretence to being other than a mere conventional stage-tyrant, violent, and ever in extremes; yet is he a man capable of much tenderness also; for he actually loves the Queen and his son, feelings of which the real Philip was incapable. Philip's jealousy in real life, as in the other two plays, only arises from a fierce sensual greed of personal possession, and from wounded pride. In Otway the king repents, although too late, and becomes reconciled to his wife and son, when he discovers that his jealousy has made him a blind tool in the hands of the enemies of Carlos and the Queen, and that they have not sinned in act. But the real Philip could not have repented. He did not believe them guilty in act. Otway's range is limited, his types are few. He could not draw a cold deliberate villain. As for his politics, they are simply those of an ordinary country clergyman's son. But he died very young, with little experience. The Philip of Schiller and Alfieri is a cold, cruel, ambitious bigot, only capable of simulating natural affection. But in each of the three tragedies the Queen and Don Carlos are powerfully presented. The German play has all the Elizabethan lack of unity. Schiller's own intense and catholic sympathy with human progress and popular aspirations dominates throughout; and while unity of motive—for instance, in the important place given to Posa, friend of Carlos, a magnificent humane ideal—is somewhat lacking, there is more human verisimilitude in his play than in that of Otway, because men and women are usually swayed by complex and manifold impulses. The political part taken by the Queen and Prince in favour of the Flemish rebels had indeed a great deal to do with the King's anger against them. The splendid interview of Posa with the tyrant, and also the Grand Inquisitor's are quite beyond Otway. Philip had wickedly married Elisabeth, who was originally betrothed to his son Carlos, and the conflict of conjugal duty with love is admirably rendered in all the tragedies, although the passion and pathos are perhaps warmest in Otway. This is the sole motive in the English and Italian plays. In Schiller there is a whole era, "the very form and pressure" of a time.

      We get as little philosophy or theology, as political and historic sympathy from Otway. In this respect he is inferior not only to Shakespeare, but to Dryden, who is able to afford more food for the intellect, if less for the heart. The terse and nervous expression of ripe and mellow life-wisdom in Dryden's Spanish Friar, for instance, is very remarkable. The greater poets indeed are usually men of great general intellectual power. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Goethe, Dante, Milton, Byron, Coleridge, Browning, occur at once to memory. Otway is perhaps exceptional in this respect. Possibly the free-thinking sentiments so fiercely hurled in the teeth of the priest by Pierre on the scaffold afford a clue to Otway's own attitude toward religion. In The Orphan we find the same ardour of friendship and attachment between the sexes, the same raging despair and revolted denial, when those fierce[Pg xxxiii] affections are disappointed—no faith. Castalio's last words are—