The author's trick of moralising at every possible opportunity, his abundant use of similes more proper to epic than dramatic language, the absence of all womanly grace in the female characters,these are points in which the present play may be compared with Chapman's published tragedies.

Cray stayed behind, pretending he did not belong to us, and he heard a man say, 'Perhaps the gentleman's a parson; that sort always think they ought to be moralising about something or other.'

The garden was thickly stocked with choice fruit-trees; there was not the slightest pretence to pleasure grounds; but there was a capital bowling-green, and, above all, a grotto, where the Doctor smoked his evening pipe, and moralised in the midst of his cucumbers and cabbages.

Moralising on that which might have been is admittedly a sterile process; but it is sometimes necessary to point, if only by way of illustration, to a possible alternative.