Almanz.  To live!  If from thy hands alone my death can be, I am immortal and a god to thee.  If I would kill thee now, thy fate’s so low, That I must stoop ere I can give the blow:  But mine is fixed so far above thy crown, That all thy men, Piled on thy back, can never pull it down:  But, at my ease, thy destiny I send, By ceasing from this hour to be thy friend.  Like heaven I need but only to stand still, And, not concurring to thy life, I kill, Thou canst no title to my duty bring; I’m not thy subject, and my soul’s thy king.  Farewell.  When I am gone, There’s not a star of thine dare stay with thee:  I’ll whistle thy tame fortune after me; And whirl fate with me wheresoe’er I fly, As winds drive storms before them in the sky.

It was expected by the audience, that the pomp of scenery, and bustle of action, in which such tremendous heroes were engaged, should in some degree correspond with their lofty sentiments and superhuman valour.  Hence solemn feasts, processions, and battles by sea and land, filled the theatre.  Hence, also, the sudden and violent changes of fortune, by which the hero and his antagonists are agitated through the whole piece.  Fortune has been often compared to the sea; but in a heroic play, her course resembled an absolute Bay of Biscay, or Race of Portland, disturbed by an hundred contending currents and eddies, and never continuing a moment in one steady flow.

That no engine of romantic surprise might be wanting, Dryden contends, that the dramatist, as he is not confined to the probable in character, so he is not limited by the bounds of nature in the action, but may let himself loose to visionary objects, and to the representation of such things as, not depending upon sense, leave free exercise for the imagination.  Indeed, if ghosts, magicians, and demons, might with propriety claim a place anywhere, it must be in plays which throughout disclaim the common rules of nature, both in the incidents narrated, and the agents interested.[3]

Lastly, the action of the heroic drama was to be laid, not merely in the higher, but in the very highest walk of life.  No one could with decorum aspire to share the sublimities which it annexed to character, except those made of the “porcelain clay of the earth,” dukes, princes, kings, and kaisars.  The matters agitated must be of moment, proportioned to their characters and elevated station, the fate of cities and the fall of kingdoms.

That the language, as well as actions and character of the dramatis personae, might be raised above the vulgar, their sentiments were delivered in rhyme, the richest and most ornate kind of verse, and the farthest removed from ordinary colloquial diction.  Dryden has himself assigned the following reasons:—­“The plot, the characters, the wit, the passions, the descriptions, are all exalted above the level of common converse, as high as the imagination of the poet can carry them, with proportion to verisimility.  Tragedy, we know, is wont to image to us the minds and fortunes of noble persons, and to portray these exactly; heroic rhyme is nearest nature, as being the noblest kind of modern verse.