extolled simplicity of the French plots, as actual barrenness, compared to the variety and copiousness of the English stage; and their authors’ limiting the attention of the audience and interest of the piece to a single principal personage, is censured as poverty of imagination, when opposed to the diversification of characters exhibited in the dramatis personae of the English poets.  Shakespeare and Jonson are then brought forward, and contrasted with the French dramatists, and with each other.  The former is extolled, as the man of all modern, and perhaps ancient, poets, who had the largest and most comprehensive soul, and intuitive knowledge of human nature; and the latter, as the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had.  But to Shakespeare, Dryden objects, that his comic sometimes degenerates into clenches, and his serious into bombast; to Jonson, the sullen and saturnine character of his genius, his borrowing from the ancients, and the insipidity of his latter plays.  The examen leads to the discussion of a point, in which Dryden had differed with Sir Robert Howard.  This was the use of rhyme in tragedy.  Our author had, it will be remembered, maintained the superiority of rhyming plays, in the Introduction to the “Rival Ladies.”  Sir Robert Howard, the catalogue of whose virtues did not include that of forbearance made a direct answer to the arguments used in that Introduction; and while he studiously extolled the plays of Lord Orrery, as affording an exception to his general sentence against rhyming plays, he does not extend the compliment to Dryden, whose defence of rhyme was expressly dedicated to that noble author.  Dryden, not much pleased, perhaps, at being left undistinguished in the general censure passed upon rhyming plays by his friend and ally, retaliates in the Essay, by placing in the mouth of Crites the arguments urged by Sir Robert Howard, and replying to them in the person of Neander.  To the charge, that rhyme is unnatural, in consequence of the inverted arrangement of the words necessary to produce it, he replies, that, duly ordered, it may be natural in itself, and therefore not unnatural in a play; and that, if the objection be further insisted upon, it is equally conclusive against blank verse, or measure without rhyme.  To the objection founded on the formal and uniform recurrence of the measure, he alleges the facility of varying it, by throwing the cadence upon different parts of the line, by breaking it into hemistichs, or by running the sense into another line, so as to make art and order appear as loose and free as nature.[19] Dryden even contends, that, for variety’s sake, the pindaric measure might be admitted, of which Davenant set an example in the “Siege of Rhodes.”  But this licence, which was probably borrowed from the Spanish stage, has never succeeded elsewhere, except in operas.  Finally, it is urged, that rhyme, the most noble verse, is alone fit for tragedies, the most noble species