position, and, when seated on the throne, soon
rendered it fashionable, partly by direct patronage, but still more by
that contemptible policy, which, for a time, made England the last of
the nations, and raised Louis the Fourteenth to a height of power and
fame, such as no French sovereign had ever before attained.

It was to please Charles that rhyme was first introduced into our plays.
Thus, a rising blow, which would at any time have been mortal, was
dealt to the English Drama, then just recovering from its languishing
condition. Two detestable manners, the indigenous and the imported, were
now in a state of alternate conflict and amalgamation. The bombastic
meanness of the new style was blended with the ingenious absurdity of
the old; and the mixture produced something which the world had never
before seen, and which, we hope, it will never see again,--something,
by the side of which the worst nonsense of all other ages appears to
advantage--something, which those who have attempted to caricature it
have, against their will, been forced to flatter--of which the tragedy
of Bayes is a very favourable specimen. What Lord Dorset observed
to Edward Howard might have been addressed to almost all his
contemporaries--

"As skilful divers to the bottom fall
Swifter than those who cannot swim at all;
So, in this way of writing without thinking,
Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking."

From this reproach some clever men of the world must be excepted, and
among them Dorset himself. Though by no means great poets, or even good
versifiers, they always wrote with meaning, and sometimes with wit.
Nothing indeed more strongly shows to what a miserable state literature
had fallen, than the immense superiority which the occasional rhymes,
carelessly thrown on paper by men of this class, possess over the
elaborate productions of almost all the professed authors. The reigning
taste was so bad, that the success of a writer was in inverse proportion
to his labour, and to his desire of excellence. An exception must be
made for Butler, who had as much wit and learning as Cowley, and who
knew, what Cowley never knew, how to use them. A great command of good
homely English distinguishes him still more from the other writers of
the time. As for Gondibert, those may criticise it who can read it.
Imagination was extinct. Taste was depraved. Poetry, driven from
palaces, colleges, and theatres, had found an asylum in the