the Scene lies under it.  This gentleman is called away, and leaves his servant with his mistress.  Presently, her father is heard from within.  The young lady is afraid the servingman should be discovered; and thrusts him through a door, which is supposed to be her Closet [Boudoir].  After this, the father enters to the daughter; and now the Scene is in a House:  for he is seeking, from one room to another, for his poor PHILIPIN or French DIEGO:  who is heard from within, drolling, and breaking many a miserable conceit upon his sad condition.  In this ridiculous manner, the Play goes on; the Stage being never empty all the while.  So that the Street, the Window, the two Houses, and the Closet are made to walk about, and the Persons to stand still!

“Now, what, I beseech you! is more easy than to write a regular French Play? or more difficult than to write an irregular English one, like those of FLETCHER, or of SHAKESPEARE?

“If they content themselves, as CORNEILLE did, with some flat design, which (like an ill riddle) is found out ere it be half proposed; such Plots, we can make every way regular, as easily as they:  but whene’er they endeavour to rise up to any quick Turns or Counter-turns of Plot, as some of them have attempted, since CORNEILLE’s Plays have been less in vogue; you see they write as irregularly as we! though they cover it more speciously.  Hence the reason is perspicuous, why no French plays, when translated, have, or ever can succeed upon the English Stage.  For, if you consider the Plots, our own are fuller of variety; if the Writing, ours are more quick, and fuller of spirit:  and therefore ’tis a strange mistake in those who decry the way of writing Plays in Verse; as if the English therein imitated the French.

“We have borrowed nothing from them.  Our Plots are weaved in English looms.  We endeavour, therein, to follow the variety and greatness of Characters, which are derived to us from SHAKESPEARE and FLETCHER, The copiousness and well knitting of the Intrigues, we have from JOHNSON.  And for the Verse itself, we have English precedents, of elder date than any of CORNEILLE’s plays.  Not to name our old Comedies before SHAKESPEARE, which are all writ in verse of six feet or Alexandrines, such as the French now use:  I can show in SHAKESPEARE, many Scenes of Rhyme together; and the like in BEN.  JOHNSON’s tragedies.  In CATILINE and SEJANUS, sometimes, thirty or forty lines.  I mean, besides the Chorus or the Monologues; which, by the way, showed BEN. no enemy to this way of writing:  especially if you look upon his Sad Shepherd, which goes sometimes upon rhyme, sometimes upon blank verse; like a horse, who eases himself upon trot and amble.  You find him, likewise, commending FLETCHER’s pastoral of the Faithful Shepherdess:  which is, for the most part, [in] Rhyme; though not refined to that purity, to which it hath since been brought.  And these examples are enough to clear us from, a servile imitation of the French.