former days were to the intrigues of Comedy. They assisted wonderfully in heightening the mysteries of the passion, and adding to the intricacy of the plot. Wycherley and Vanbrugh could not have spared the dresses of Vandyke. These strange fancy-dresses, perverse disguises, and counterfeit shapes, gave an agreeable scope to the imagination. "That sevenfold fence" was a sort of foil to the lusciousness of the dialogue, and a barrier against the sly encroachments of double entendre. The greedy eye and bold hand of indiscretion were repressed, which gave a greater licence to the tongue. The senses were not to be gratified in an instant. Love was entangled in the folds of the swelling handkerchief, and the desires might wander for ever round the circumference of a quilted petticoat, or find a rich lodging in the flowers of a damask stomacher. There was room for years of patient contrivance, for a thousand thoughts, schemes, conjectures, hopes, fears, and wishes. There seemed no end of difficulties and delays; to overcome so many obstacles was the work of ages. A mistress was an angel concealed behind whalebone, flounces, and brocade. What an undertaking to penetrate through the disguise! What an impulse must it give to the blood, what a keenness to the invention, what a volubility to the tongue! "Mr. Smirk, you are a brisk man," was then the

most significant commendation. But now-a-daysA woman can be but undressed!

The same account might be extended to Tragedy. Aristotle has long since said, that Tragedy purifies the mind by terror and pity; that is, substitutes an artificial and intellectual interest for real passion. Tragedy, like Comedy, must therefore defeat itself; for its patterns must be drawn from the living models within the breast, from feeling or from observation ; and the materials of Tragedy cannot be found among a people, who are the habitual spectators of Tragedy, whose interests and passions are not their own, but ideal, remote, sentimental, and abstracted. It is for this reason chiefly, we conceive, that the highest efforts of the Tragic Muse are in general the earliest ; where the strong impulses of nature are not lost in the refinement and glosses of art; where the writers themselves, and those whom they saw about them, had "warm hearts of flesh and blood beating in their bosoms, and were not embowelled of their natural entrails, and stuffed with paltry blurred sheets of paper." Shakspeare, with all his genius, could not have written as he did, if he had lived in the present times. Nature would not have presented itself to him in the same freshness and vigour; he must have seen it through all the refractions of successive dulness, and his powers would have languished in the

dense atmosphere of logic and criticism. "Men's minds," he somewhere says, "are parcel of their fortunes;" and his age was necessary to him. It

was this which enabled him to grapple at once with nature, and which stamped his character with her image and superscription.

ON DRAMATIC POETRY.*

GODWIN, COLERIDGE, SCOTT, ETC.

THE age we live in is critical, didactic, paradoxical, romantic, but it is not dramatic. This, if any, is its weak side. When we give it as our opinion, that this is not "the high and palmy state" of the productions of the stage, we would be understood to signify, that there has hardly been a good tragedy or a good comedy written within the last fifty years, that is, since the time of Home's Douglas, and Sheridan's School for Scandal; and when we speak of a good tragedy or comedy, we mean one that will be thought so fifty years hence. Not that we would have it supposed, that a work, to be worth any thing, must last always: but we think that a play that only runs its one-and-twenty nights, that does not reach beyond the life of an actor, or the fashion of a single generation, may be fairly set down as good for nothing, to any purposes of criticism, or serious admiration. Time seems to have its circle as well as the globe we inhabit; the loftiest eminences, by degrees, sink beneath the horizon; the greatest works are

* 1820.

lost sight of in the end, and cannot be restored; but those that disappear at the first step we take, or are hidden by the first object that intervenes, can, in either case, be of no real magnitude or importance. We have never seen the highest range of mountains in the world; nor are the longest-lived works intelligible to us (from the difference both of language and manners) at this day: but the name of the Andes, and that of old, blind Homer, serves us on this side of the globe, and at the lag-end of time, to repeat and wonder at; and that we have ever heard of either is alone sufficient proof of the vastness of the one, and of the sublimity of the other! Without waiting for the final award, or gradual oblivion of slow-revolving ages, we may be bold to say of our writers for the stage, during the last twenty or thirty years, as Pope is reported to have said of Ben Jonson's, somewhat unadvisedly, "What trash are their works, taken altogether!" We would not deny or depreciate merit, wherever we find it, in individuals, or in classes for instance, we grant that all the pantomimes are good in which Mr. Grimaldi plays the clown; and that the melodrames have been excellent, when Mr. Farley had a hand in them; and that the farces could not be damned if Munden showed his face in them; and that O'Keeffe's could not fail with an audience that had a mind to laugh: