If we are asked the merit of a performance which made such an impression at the time, we may borrow an expression applied to a certain orator,[7] and say, that “The Empress of Morocco” must have acted to the tune of a good heroic play.  It had all the outward and visible requisites of splendid scenery, prisons, palaces, fleets, combats of desperate duration and uncertain issue,[8] assassinations, a dancing tree, a rainbow, a shower of hail, a criminal executed,[9] and hell itself opening upon the stage.  The rhyming dialogue too, in which the play was written, had an imperative and tyrannical sound; and to a foreigner, ignorant of the language, might have appeared as magnificent as that of Dryden.  But it must raise our admiration, that the witty court of Charles could patiently listen to a “tale told by an idiot, full of noise and fury, signifying nothing,” and give it a preference over the poetry of Dryden.  The following description of a hail-storm will vindicate our wonder: 

  “This morning, as our eyes we upward cast,
  The desert regions of the air lay waste. 
  But straight, as if it had some penance bore,
  A mourning garb of thick black clouds it wore. 
  But on the sudden,
  Some aery demon changed its form, and now
  That which looked black above looked white below;
  The clouds dishevelled from their crusted locks,
  Something like gems coined out of crystal rocks. 
  The ground was with this strange bright issue spread,
  As if heaven in affront to nature had
  Designed some new-found tillage of its own,
  And on the earth these unknown seeds had sown. 
  Of these I reached a grain, which to my sense
  Appeared as cool as virgin-innocence;
  And like that too (which chiefly I admired),
  Its ravished whiteness with a touch expired. 
  At the approach of heat, this candid rain
  Dissolved to its first element again.

  Muly-H. Though showers of hail Morocco never see,
  Dull priest, what does all this portend to me?

  Ham.  It does portend—­

  Muly. What?

  Ham.  That the fates design—­

  Muly.  To tire me with impertinence like thine.”

Such were the strains once preferred to the magnificent verses of Dryden; whose very worst bombast is sublimity compared to them.  To prove which, the reader need only peruse the Indian’s account of the Spanish fleet in the “Indian Emperor,” to which the above lines are a parallel; each being the description of an object familiar to the audience, but new to the describer.  The poet felt the disgraceful preference more deeply than was altogether becoming; but he had levelled his powers, says Johnson, when he levelled his desires to those of Settle, and placed his happiness in the claps of multitudes.  The moral may be carried yet further; for had not Dryden stooped to call to the aid of his poetry the auxiliaries