The greater poets indeed are usually men
of great general intellectual power. Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Spenser, Goethe, Dante, Milton,
Byron, Coleridge, Browning, occur at once
to memory. Otway is perhaps exceptional in
this respect. Possibly the free-thinking sen-
timents so fiercely hurled in the teeth of the
priest by Pierre on the scaffold afford a clue to
Otway's own attitude toward religion. In The
Orphan we find the same ardour of friendship and
attachment between the sexes, the same raging
despair and revolted denial, when those fierce



THOMAS OTWAY, xxxiii

afifections are disappointed — no faith. Castalio's
last words are —

Patience ! preach it to the winds,

To roaring seas, or raging fires ; the knaves

That teach it laugh at ye when ye believe them. * * *

Now all I beg is, lay me in one grave.
Thus with my love ! Farewell, I now am — nothing.
And Chamfort's, the last in the play :

*Tis thus that Heaven its empire does maintain ;
It may afflict, but man must not complain.
The scenes in Don Carlos, where Carlos and the
Queen meet, are admirably right in their abrupt,
interrupted utterance, and must have been most
effective on the stage. On the whole, no better
opportunity exists for comparing the classical and
romantic manners than in the examples afforded
by these three plays on the reign of Philip. Don
John's soliloquy about bastardy and free love is
exceptionally good as a purple patch of poetry in
Otway, though not without a reminiscence of
Shakespeare's Edmund. There are likewise two
splendid lines uttered by the King when Gomez is
tempting him to suspect his son and queen.
Gomez says :

*Ti8 true they gazed, but 'twas not very long.
