bo 
bo 
ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
Their children and their whole posterity, 
The thing that Heaven and nature most abhors. 
May the see this like you, like you detest it, 
Then grow like you impatient to be free, 
With us asserting God-like liberty.” 
CRITICISM. 
As is well-known it was quite common for the great masters of the 
English drama to deviate from the line of historic accuracy in their works 
for the purposes of the plot. Shakespeare and Marlowe are instances 
of this. It is but fair to state that so far as the writer has been able 
to ascertain, the family relationship of Frontenac to the Huron tribe, 
introduced into the drama, is pure fiction. 
The didactic speeches on behalf of liberty in the drama are quite 
too long, and the introduction to the printed copy tells us they had to 
be curtailed for representation on the stage. Lack of humour through- 
out may also be thought a defect. There is none of the by-play of 
minor characters that so often lights up a lagging scene in a play, and 
no “poor fool and knave,” as in King Lear, “labours to out-jest”’ 
Beaufort’s heart-struck sorrows. 
Nevertheless, there is repartee and epigram and the incidents move 
so rapidly there is very little feeling of tedium. Although the political 
and warlike motives of the piece are kept prominently to the front, the 
human interest, the friendship, the love, the family affection, is by no 
means overshadowed. 
The dramatic unities are observed; the French regulations being 
followed, that the drama should be enacted in one place and the time 
allotted to it one day. In the last act the principal characters are gradu- 
ally grouped together ready for the falling of the curtain. The fashion 
that prevailed in Charles the Second’s time, that every play, even a 
tragedy, should end happily, to please that pleasure-loving monarch, 
is imitated. 
THE PURPOSE AIMED AT IN THE PLAY. 
Dennis, in his preface to this drama, defends himself against the 
imputation that it was written in a party spirit on behalf of the Whigs. 
He says, “The party for whom this play was writ are all those who have 
any concern for their country, their relatives, their friends and their 
children, and the party it was writ against are those who care not a 
farthing for any of these.” He also repudiates the idea that it was 
written in a spirit of rancour against the French people. He asserts 
that it is not against the French as a nation that he has any unfriendly 
feeling, but that it is the tyrannical rule of the French monarchy that 
