What he began, Dryden and others carried out to greater completion; and the public taste eventually became so changed, that Otway's "Caius Marius" displaced "Romeo and Juliet" for seventy years. For eighty years, Dryden's "All for Love" was performed instead of "Antony and Cleopatra;" and Davenant's alteration of "Macbeth" was preferred to the original for a like number of years. Dryden looked on this as the commencement of a new and more auspicious era for the English stage. "For myself," he observes, "and others who come after him we are bound with all veneration to his memory, to acknowledge what advantage we received from that excellent groundwork which he laid." But, as Hazlitt remarks, "Dryden had no dramatic genius, either in tragedy or comedy." He was unable to estimate correctly in what the great excellence of the Elizabethan writers consisted, nor did he discern the tendency or the causes of the literary revolution in which he was so conspicuous an actor. His appreciation, however, of the peculiar talents of his coadjutor shows both generosity and discernment. "I found him," says he, "of so quick a fancy, that nothing was proposed to him, on which he could not suddenly produce a thought extremely pleasant and surprising; and those first thoughts of his, contrary to the old Latin proverb, were not always the least happy. And as his fancy was quick, so likewise were the products of it remote and new. He borrowed not of any other; and his imaginations were such as could not easily enter into any other man. His corrections were sober and judicious; and he corrected his own writings much more severely than those of another man, bestowing twice the time and labour in polishing which he used in invention."
Davenant's loyalty or restlessness brought him into further trouble during the commotions which took place previous to the Restoration. To use his own words, he
