Almah.  It therefore yields the only pure content; For it, like angels, needs no nourishment.  To eat and drink can no perfection be; All appetite implies necessity.

Almanz.  ’Twere well, if I could like a spirit live; But, do not angels food to mortals give?  What if some demon should my death foreshow, Or bid me change, and to the Christians go; Will you not think I merit some reward, When I my love above my life regard?

  Almah.  In such a case your change must be allowed: 
  I would myself dispense with what you vowed.

  Almanz.  Were I to die that hour when I possess,
  This minute shall begin my happiness.

  Almah.  The thoughts of death your passion would remove;
  Death is a cold encouragement to love.

Almanz.  No; from my joys I to my death would run, And think the business of my life well done:  But I should walk a discontented ghost, If flesh and blood were to no purpose lost.

This kind of Amoebaean dialogue was early ridiculed by the ingenious author of “Hudibras."[1]

It partakes more of the Spanish than of the French tragedy, although it does not demand that the parody shall be so very strict, as to re-echo noun for noun, or verb for verb, which Lord Holland gives us as a law of the age of Lope de Vega.[2] The English heroic poet did enough if he displayed sufficient point in the dialogue, and alertness in adopting and retorting the image presented by the preceding speech; though, if he could twist the speaker’s own words into an answer to his argument, it seems to have been held the more ingenious mode of confutation.

While the hero of a rhyming tragedy was thus unboundedly submissive in love, and dexterous in applying the metaphysical logic of amorous jurisprudence it was essential to his character that he should possess all the irresistible courage, and fortune of a preux chevalier.  Numbers, however unequal, were to be as chaff before the whirlwind of his valour; and nothing was to be so impossible that, at the command of his mistress, he could not with ease achieve.  When, in the various changes of fortune which such tragedies demand, he quarrelled with those whom he had before assisted to conquer,

  “Then to the vanquished part his fate he led,
  The vanquished triumphed, and the victor fled.”

The language of such a personage, unless when engaged in argumentative dialogue with his mistress, was, in all respects, as magnificent and inflated as might beseem his irresistible prowess.  Witness the famous speech of Almanzor: