However hardily Dryden stood forward in defence of the heroic plays, he confessed, even in the heat of argument, that Rhyme, though he was brave and generous, and his dominion pleasing, had still somewhat of the usurper in him.  A more minute inquiry seems to have still further demonstrated the weakness of this usurped dominion; and our author’s good taste and practice speedily pointed out deficiencies and difficulties, which Sir Robert Howard, against whom he defended the use of rhyme, could not show, because he never aimed at the excellencies which they impeded.  The perusal of Shakespeare, on whom Dryden had now turned his attention, led him to feel, that something further might be attained in tragedy than the expression of exaggerated sentiment in smooth verse, and that the scene ought to represent not a fanciful set of agents exerting their superhuman faculties in a fairy-land of the poet’s own creation, but human characters, acting from the direct and energetic influence of human passions, with whose emotions the audience might sympathise, because akin to the feelings of their own hearts.  When Dryden had once discovered, that fear and pity were more likely to be excited by other causes than the logic of metaphysical love, or the dictates of fantastic honour, he must have found, that rhyme sounded as unnatural in the dialogue of characters drawn upon the usual scale of humanity, as the plate and mail of chivalry would have appeared on the persons of the actors.  The following lines of the Prologue to “Aureng-Zebe,” although prefixed to a rhyming play, the last which he ever wrote, express Dryden’s change of sentiment on these points: 

  “Our author, by experience, finds it true,
  ’Tis much more hard to please himself than you: 
  And, out of no feigned modesty, this day
  Damns his laborious trifle of a play: 
  Not that it’s worse than what before he writ,
  But he has now another taste of wit;
  And, to confess a truth, though out of time,
  Grows weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme. 
  Passion’s too fierce to be in fetters bound,
  And Nature flies him like enchanted ground: 
  What verse can do, he has performed in this,
  Which he presumes the most correct of his;
  But spite of all his pride, a secret shame
  Invades his breast at Shakespeare’s sacred name: 
  Awed when he hears his godlike Romans rage,
  He, in a just despair, would quit the stage;
  And to an age less polished, more unskilled,
  Does, with disdain, the foremost honours yield.”

It is remarkable, as a trait of character, that, though our author admitted his change of opinion on this long disputed point, he would not consent that it should be imputed to any arguments which his opponents had the wit to bring against him.  On this subject he enters a protest in the Preface to his revised edition of the “Essay of Dramatic Poesy” in 1684:—­“I confess, I find many things in this discourse which I do not now approve;