No second vows can with your first dis- To lose mine there where I would have it

You sought a heart that was engaged be-
fore.
'Twas a swift love which took you in his Your image sticks so close,
way;

Almah. Adieu, then, O my soul's far bet-
ter part!

Flew only through your heart, but made no stay:

'Twas but a dream, where truth had not a
place;

A scene of fancy, moved so swift a pace,
And shifted, that you can but think it

Almah. Then say what charity I can al-
low;

I would contribute if I knew but how.
Take friendship; or, if that too small appear,
Take love which sisters may to brothers
bear.

Almanz. A sister's love! that is so palled
a thing,
What pleasure can it to a lover bring?
'Tis like thin food to men in fevers spent;
Just keeps alive, but gives no nourishment.
What hopes, what fears, what transports can
it move?

'Tis but the ghost of a departed love.

Almah. You, like some greedy cormorant,
devour

All my whole life can give you, in an hour.
What more I can do for you is to die,
And that must follow, if you this deny.
Since I gave up my love, that you might
live,

You, in refusing life, my sentence give.

Almanz. Far from my breast be such an impious thought!

Your death would lose the quiet mine had
sought.

I'll live for you, in spite of misery;
But you shall grant that I had rather die.
I'll be so wretched, filled with such despair,

That the blood follows from my rending heart.

A last farewell!

For, since a last must come, the rest are vain,

Like gasps in death, which but prolong our
pain.

But, since the king is now a part of me,
Cease from henceforth to be his enemy.
Go now, for pity go! for, if you stay,
I fear I shall have something still to say.
Thus-I for ever shut you from my sight.

[Veils.

Almans. Like one thrust out in a cold
winter's night,

Yet shivering underneath your gate I stay;
One look-I cannot go before 'tis day.-
[She beckons him to be gone.
Not one-Farewell: Whate'er my sufferings
be

Within, I'll speak farewell as loud as she:
I will not be outdone in constancy.-

[She turns her back.
Then like a dying conqueror I go;
At least I have looked last upon my foe.
I go but if too heavily I move,

I walk encumbered with a weight of love.
Fain I would leave the thought of you be-
hind,

But still, the more I cast you from my mind, You dash, like water, back, when thrown [Exit.

against the wind.

[As he goes off, the King meets him with ABENAMAR; they stare at each other without saluting.

Boab. With him go all my fears. A guard there wait,

And see him safe without the city gate.

To them ABDELMELECH.

Now, Abdelmelech, is my brother dead?

Abdelm. The usurper to the Christian
camp is fled;

Whom as Granada's lawful king they own,
And vow, by force, to seat him on the throne.
Meantime the rebels in the Albayzin rest;
Which is in Lyndaraxa's name possessed.

Boab. Haste and reduce it instantly by
force.

Abdelm. First give me leave to prove a milder course.

She will, perhaps, on summons yield the place.

Boab. We cannot to your suit refuse her grace.

[One enters hastily, and whispers ABEN

AMAR.

Aben. How fortune persecutes this hoary head!

That you shall see to live was more to dare. My Ozmyn is with Selin's daughter fled.

But he's no more my son:
My hate shall like a Zegry him pursue,
Till I take back what blood from me he
drew.

Some wiser poet now would leave Fame first;
But elder wits are, like old lovers, cursed:
Who, when the vigor of their youth is spent,
Still grow more fond, as they grow impotent.

Boab. Let war and vengeance be to-mor- This, some years hence, our poet's case may row's care;

But let us to the temple now repair.

A thousand torches make the mosque more
bright:

This must be mine and Almahida's night.
Hence, ye importunate affairs of state,
You should not tyrannize on love, but wait.
Had life no love, none would for business
live;

Yet still from love the largest part we give;
And must be forced, in empire's weary toil,
To live long wretched, to be pleased a while.
[Exeunt.

EPILOGUE

Success, which can no more than beauty last,
Makes our sad poet mourn your favors past:
For, since without desert he got a name,
He fears to lose it now with greater shame.
Fame, like a little mistress of the town,
Is gained with ease, but then she's lost as

soon:

For, as those tawdry misses, soon or late,
Jilt such as keep 'em at the highest rate;
(And oft the lacquey, or the brawny clown,
Gets what is hid in the loose-bodied gown),-
So, Fame is false to all that keep her long;
And turns up to the fop that's brisk and

young.

prove:

But yet, he hopes, he's young enough to
love.

When forty comes, if e'er he live to see
That wretched, fumbling age of poetry,
'Twill be high time to bid his Muse adieu:
Well he may please himself, but never you.
Till then, he'll do as well as he began,
And hopes you will not find him less a man.
Think him not duller for this year's delay;
He was prepared, the women were away;
And men, without their parts, can hardly
play.
If they, through sickness, seldom did ap-
pear,

Pity the virgins of each theatre:

For at both houses 'twas a sickly year!
And pity us, your servants, to whose cost,
In one such sickness, nine whole months are
lost.

Their stay, he fears, has ruined what he
writ:

Long waiting both disables love and wit. They thought they gave him leisure to do well;

But, when they forced him to attend, he fell!
Yet, though he much has failed, he begs,
to-day,

You will excuse his unperforming play:
Weakness sometimes great passion does ex-

press;

He had pleased better, had he loved you less.

ALL FOR LOVE

THE Preface and Prologue to Dryden's All for Love (1678) proclaim the passing of his period of heroic plays. The versatile leader of Restoration drama now "fights unarmed without his rhyme." "His hero bates of his mettle and scarce rants at all." In his style he professes to imitate the divine Shakspere. Such imitations were now common enough. Shadwell in Timon of Athens, Ravencroft in Titus Andronicus, Tate in King Lear, Lacy in his version of The Shrew, Sauny the Scot, had catered to changing taste of changing time. Dryden himself, eleven years before (1667), had entered the circle of Shakspere's magic in company with Sir William Davenant, producing thus the abortive adaptation of The Tempest with its new spawns of Caliban's sister, Miranda's male counterpart and another and feminine Ariel. During these eleven years Dryden's already large reverence for the great Elizabethan had increased to but little this side idolatry. In An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, printed in 1668, he mingles with high commendation free criticism of Shakspere's wit and language. In his Defense of the Epilogue which accompanied The Conquest of Granada (1672), he finds on every page of Shakspere and Fletcher some solecism of speech or some notorious flaw of sense and recognizes in the greater of the two "a carelessness and a lethargy of thought for whole scenes together.". Now in the All for Love Preface he marvels that "much of his language remains so pure." A year later (1679) he again pays the master the tribute of imitation in his new-modelling of Troilus and Cressida, but this alteration seems sheer anticlimax after the splendid triumph of our present play.

The ingenious application of "pseudo-classic dramatic rules to the familiar subject of Antony and Cleopatra" (Noyes) was to Dryden a labor of love. "I never writ anything for myself but Antony and Cleopatra." The purpose of his version, aptly called All for Love, is clearly defined in the Preface: "I have endeavored in this play to follow the practice of the ancients, who, as Mr. Rymer has judiciously observed, are and ought to be our masters." "The fabric of the play is regular enough, as to the inferior parts of it; and the unities of time, place, and action more exactly observed than perhaps the English theatre requires. Particularly the action is so much one that it is the only of the kind without episode or underplot; every scene in the tragedy conducing to the main design, and every act concluding with a turn of it."

It is, therefore, in Dryden's classical concern for the unities of place,

time, and action, that he first invites contrast with Shakspere, whom he regards as “deficient in the mechanic beauties of plot." Shakspere's changes of scene-possible only on the simple symbolic platform of his time and on the complex realistic stage of ours-fall little short of forty. The background is almost as varied as the Roman Empire itself—Rome, Alexandria, Messenum, Athens, Pompey's galley on the high seas, the plains of Syria, the promontory of Actium. Dryden rigidly limits the action to the Egyptian capital-the temple of Isis, and, perhaps, the palace of Cleopatra. Shakspere's play covers ten years of history, Dryden's a single crowded day. If, as has been objected, the Restoration dramatist runs counter to both history and probability in thus condensing events far too spacious for his narrow timecompass, he follows in such concentration much illustrious precedent-witness the Agamemnon. The action, too, has nought of the epic breadth of Shakspere's imperial theme, but is limited to the crisis in the story of the royal lovers. Antony and Cleopatra is the all-embracing picture of an age in which the empire of the world was cast into the balance. All for Love obscures this world-struggle and emphasizes the merely personal aspects of the oft-told tale. Thus the most comprehensive of Shakspere's later plots is everywhere narrowed in the interest of classical order and restraint.

To speak more definitely of the technique of Dryden's orderly drama: He certainly owes nothing to Appian and Dio Cassius, of whom in his Preface he makes misleading mention, and, save in Cleopatra's death-scene, but little directly to Plutarch. His first four acts are largely of his own making, and it is only in his fifth that Shaksperean allusions are plentiful. The conclusion follows the model rather closely. The finest passage in the play-and here the author and his editors are in entire accord-is the scene in the first act between Antony and Ventidius with its faraway reminiscence of Brutus and Cassius at half-sword parley. And yet it is here that we encounter the most inapt of all Dryden's liftings, when, for the sake of a few melodious lines, he metamorphoses Antony into Jaques, the malcontent of Arden. Something of Shakspere's power is caught in the noble scene in which Cleopatra dons crown and jewels before her death. But the incident which has occasioned largest debate is the meeting between Octavia and Cleopatra. Some deem it a regular scolding match, two pea-hens in a passion," and declare that "Shakspere would never have opposed the captivating, brilliant and meretricious Cleopatra to the noble and chaste Octavia." On the other hand Furness praises the dignity of the scene and Churton Collins regards it as perhaps finer than anything which the stage had seen since Massinger. Certainly, a comparison between this scene and the "heroic" treatment of a very similar situation in The Rival Queens by Nat Lee invites only admiration for Dryden's self-restraint. In the author's own discussion of the mooted passage, he places himself frankly on the side of illicit love. "I had not enough considered," he writes in his Preface, "that the compassion she [Octavia] moved to herself and children was

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