EPILOGUE. The appendix or supplement to a literary work, and in particular to a drama in verse, is called an epilogue, from iiriXoyos the name given by the Greeks to the peroration of a speech. As we read in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, the epilogue was generally treated as the apology for a play; it was a final appeal made to encourage the good-nature of the audiences, and to deprecate attack. Ben Jonson made it a fea ture of his drama, and may almost be said to have invented the tradition of its regular use. He employed the epilogue for two pur poses, either to assert the merit of the play or to deprecate cen sure of its defects. Beaumont and Fletcher used the epilogue sparingly, but after their day it came more and more into vogue, and the form was almost invariably that which Ben Jonson had brought into fashion, namely, the short complete piece in heroic couplets. The hey-day of the epilogue, however, was the Restora tion, and from 166o to the decline of the drama in the reign of Queen Anne scarcely a play, serious or comic, was produced on the London stage without a prologue and an epilogue. It became the custom for playwrights to ask their friends to write these poems for them, and the publishers would even come to a prom inent poet and ask him to supply one for a fee. It gives us an idea of the seriousness with which the epilogue was treated that Dryden originally published his valuable "Defence of the Epi logue; or An Essay on the Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age" (1672) as a defence of the epilogue which he had written for The Conquest of Granada.