impossible, and it is still a
matter for wonder by what trick of elocution actors can have made it
tolerable on the stage. Yet it was certainly tolerated. And not only so,
but, when the theatre came to be open again, the discontent with blank
verse, which partly at least drove Dryden and others into rhyme, never
seems to have noticed the fact that the blank verse to which it objected
was execrably bad. When Dryden returned to the more natural medium, he
wrote it not indeed with the old many-voiced charm of the best
Elizabethans, but with admirable eloquence and finish. Yet he himself in
his earliest plays staggered and slipped about with the rest, and I do not
remember in his voluminous critical remarks anything going to show that he
was consciously aware of the slovenliness into which his master Davenant
and others had allowed themselves and their followers to drop.

One more example and we shall have finished at once with those dramatists
of our time whose work has been collected, and with the chief names of the
decadence. Sir John Suckling, who, in Mr. Swinburne's happy phrase--

"Stumbled from above
And reeled in slippery roads of alien art,"

is represented in the English theatre by four plays, _Aglaura_,
_Brennoralt_, _The Sad One_, and the comedy of _The Goblins_. Of the
tragedies some one, I forget who, has said truly that their names are the
best thing about them. Suckling had a fancy for romantic names, rather
suggesting sometimes the Minerva press of a later time, but still pretty.
His serious plays, however, have all the faults, metrical and other, which
have been noticed in Davenant, and in speaking of his own non-dramatic
verse; and they possess as well serious faults as dramas--a combination of
extravagance and dullness, a lack of playwright's grasp, an absence in
short of the root of the matter. How far in other directions besides mere
versification he and his fellows had slipped from the right way, may be
perhaps most pleasantly and quite fully discovered from the perusal, which
is not very difficult, of his tragi-comedy or extravaganza, _The Goblins_.
There are several good points about this play--an abundance of not
altogether stagey noble sentiment, an agreeable presentment of fresh and
gallant youths, still smacking rather of Fletcher's madcap but heart-sound
gallants, and not anticipating the heartless crudity of the cubs of the
Restoration, a loveable feminine characte