Unities.  Dryden followed his example in his Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1667), in which he treated of the unities, and argued for the use of rime in tragedy in preference to blank verse.  His own practice varied.  Most of his tragedies were written in rime, but in the best of them, All for Love, founded on Shakspere’s Antony and Cleopatra, he returned to blank verse.  One of the principles of the classical school was to keep comedy and tragedy distinct.  The tragic dramatists of the Restoration, Dryden, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Lee, and others, composed what they called “heroic plays,” such as the Indian Emperor, the Conquest of Granada, the Duke of Lerma, the Empress of Morocco, the Destruction of Jerusalem, Nero, and the Rival Queens.  The titles of these pieces indicate their character.  Their heroes were great historic personages.  Subject and treatment were alike remote from nature and real life.  The diction was stilted and artificial, and pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine passion.  The tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on Shakspere, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare his Phedre, or Iphigenie, with Dryden’s ranting tragedy of Tyrannic Love.  These bombastic heroic plays were made the subject of a capital burlesque, the Rehearsal, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 1671 at the King’s Theater.  The indebtedness of the English stage to the French did not stop with a general adoption of its dramatic methods, but extended to direct imitation and translation.  Dryden’s comedy, An Evening’s Love, was adapted from Thomas Corneille’s Le Feint Astrologue, and his Sir Martin Mar-all, from Moliere’s L’Etourdi.  Shadwell borrowed his Miser from Moliere, and Otway made versions of Racine’s Berenice and Moliere’s Fourberies de Scapin.  Wycherley’s Country Wife and Plain Dealer although not translations, were based, in a sense, upon Moliere’s Ecole des Femmes and Le Misanthrope.  The only one of the tragic dramatists of the Restoration who prolonged the traditions of the Elizabethan stage was Otway, whose Venice Preserved, written in blank verse, still keeps the boards.  There are fine passages in Dryden’s heroic plays, passages weighty in thought and nobly sonorous in language.  There is one great scene (between Antony and Ventidius) in his All for Love.  And one, at least, of his comedies, the Spanish Friar, is skillfully constructed.  But his nature was not pliable enough for the drama, and he acknowledged that, in writing for the stage, he “forced his genius.”