O thou bright, glorious morning,
  Thou Oriental spring-time of the day,
  Who with thy mixed vermilion colours paintest
  The sky, these hills and plains! thou dost return
  In thy accustom’d manner, but with thee
  Shall ne’er return my wonted happiness.

Through his Roman tragedy there runs a pensive vein of sadness, as though the poet were thinking less of his Aurelia and his Valentius than of the lost common-room and the arcades of Magdalen to be no more revisited.

Our next play is a worse one, but much more pretentious.  It is the Usurper, of 1668, the first of four dramas published by the Hon. Edward Howard, one of Dryden’s aristocratic brothers-in-law.  Edward Howard is memorable for a couplet constantly quoted from his epic poem of The British Princes: 

  A vest as admired Vortiger had on,
  Which from a naked Pict his grandsire won.

Poor Howard has received the laughter of generations for representing Vortiger’s grandsire as thus having stripped one who was bare already.  But this is the wickedness of some ancient wag, perhaps of Dryden himself, who loved to laugh at his brother-in-law.  At all events, the first (and, I suppose, only) edition of The British Princes is before me at this moment, and the second of these lines certainly runs: 

Which from this island’s foes his grandsire won.

Thus do the critics, leaping one after another, like so many sheep, follow the same wrong track, in this case for a couple of centuries.  The Usurper is a tragedy, in which a Parasite, “a most perfidious villain,” plays a mysterious part.  He is led off to be hanged at last, much to the reader’s satisfaction, who murmurs, in the words of R.L.  Stevenson, “There’s an end of that.”

But though the Usurper is dull, we reach a lower depth and muddier lees of wit in the Carnival, a comedy by Major Thomas Porter, of 1664.  It is odd, however, that the very worst production, if it be more than two hundred years old, is sure to contain some little thing interesting to a modern student.  The Carnival has one such peculiarity.  Whenever any of the characters is left alone on the stage, he begins to soliloquise in the stanza of Gray’s Churchyard Elegy.  This is a very quaint innovation, and one which possibly occurred to brave Major Porter in one of the marches and counter-marches of the Civil War.

But the man who perseveres is always rewarded, and the fourth play in our volume really repays us for pushing on so far.  Here is a piece of wild and ghostly poetry that is well worth digging out of the Duke of Newcastle’s Humorous Lovers: