beauty of the style. All which he would have performed with more
exactness, had he pleased to have given us another work of the same
nature. For myself and others, who come after him, we are bound, with
all veneration to his memory, to acknowledge what advantage we
received from that excellent groundwork which he laid: And, since it
is an easy thing to add to what already is invented, we ought all of
us, without envy to him, or partiality to ourselves, to yield him the
precedence in it.

Having done him this justice, as my guide, I may do myself so much, as
to give an account of what I have performed after him. I observed
then, as I said, what was wanting to the perfection of his "Siege of
Rhodes;" which was design, and variety of characters. And in the midst
of this consideration by mere accident, I opened the next book that
lay by me, which was "Ariosto," in Italian; and the very first two
lines of that poem gave me light to all I could desire;

_Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto,_ &c.

For the very next reflection which I made was this, that an heroic
play ought to be an imitation, in little, of an heroic poem; and,
consequently, that love and valour ought to be the subject of it. Both
these Sir William D'Avenant had begun to shadow; but it was so, as
first discoverers draw their maps, with headlands, and promontories,
and some few outlines of somewhat taken at a distance, and which the
designer saw not clearly. The common drama obliged him to a plot well
formed and pleasant, or, as the ancients call it, one entire and great
action. But this he afforded not himself in a story, which he neither
filled with persons, nor beautified with characters, nor varied with
accidents. The laws of an heroic poem did not dispense with those of
the other, but raised them to a greater height, and indulged him a
farther liberty of fancy, and of drawing all things as far above the
ordinary proportion of the stage, as that is beyond the common words
and actions of human life; and, therefore, in the scanting of his
images and design, he complied not enough with the greatness and
majesty of an heroic poem.

I am sorry I cannot discover my opinion of this kind of writing,
without dissenting much from his, whose memory I love and honour. But
I will do it with the same respect to him, as if he were now alive,
and overlooking my paper while I write. His judgment of an heroic poem
was this