counter-jumpers: but it has never to my knowledge been observed that in the scene 'where they toss their pikes so,' which aroused the special enthusiasm of the worthy fellow-citizen whose own prentice was to bear the knightly ensign of the Burning Pestle, Heywood, the future object of Dryden's ignorant and pointless insult, anticipated with absolute exactitude the style of Dryden's own tragic blusterers when most busily bandying tennis-balls of ranting rhyme in mutual challenge and reciprocal retort of amœbæan epigram.[1]
It is a pity that Heywood's civic or professional devotion to the service of the metropolis should ever have been worse employed than in the transfiguration of the idealised prentice: it is a greater pity that we cannot exchange all Heywood's extant masques for any one of the two hundred plays or so now missing in which, as he tells us, he 'had either an entire hand, or at least a main finger.'
- ↑ Compare this with any similar sample of heroic dialogue in 'Tyrannic Love' or 'The Conquest of Granada':
'Rapier and pike, is that thy honoured play?
Look down, ye gods, this combat to survey.'
'Rapier and pike this combat shall decide:
Gods, angels, men, shall see me tame thy pride.'
'I'll teach thee: thou shalt like my zany be,
And feign to do my cunning after me.'This will remind the reader not so much of the 'Rehearsal' as of Butler's infinitely superior parody in the heroic dialogue of Cat and Puss.
