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on some such plan, and by some such rules, as we have drawn up. We are confident, that no Greek lexicon, unless conducted on such principles, will be of any extensive use to the classical world, or permanently redound to the credit of its author: whereas, if managed in the manner we have described, with suitable care and talent, it would prove an eternal monument of the learning and industry of its compilers, and soon throw into disuse all the editions of Stephanus, or Scapula, or Schneider, which ever have been or ever will be published.*

ART. VIII.-1. Hernani. Par Victor Hugo. 1831. 2. Marion de Lorme. Par Victor Hugo.

3. Le Roi s'amuse. Par Victor Hugo.

1831. 1832.

4. Lucrèce Borgia. Par Victor Hugo. 1833.

5. Marie Tudor. Par Victor Hugo.

1833.

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9. Angèle. Par Alex. Dumas.

1832.

1834.

10. Richard Darlington. Par Alex. Dumas. 11. La Tour de Nesle. Par M. Guillardet Dumas). 1832.

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12. Hernani, and Catherine of Cleves. Translated from the French by Lord Francis Leveson Gower. 1832. IT is a remarkable circumstance, though it has not been, that we know of, yet remarked, that though literature had the chief hand in preparing the French Revolution, it had little influence on its progress, and little share in its success. The men of the

pen

undermined

*Since writing the above, we have seen the fourth number of the Paris Thesaurus, which, to our surprise, is not an immediate continuation of the former three numbers, but the commencement of the letter B, and not compiled by the same editors. M. Hase, indeed, it seems, still superintends the whole; but while his former associates are continuing their labours in A, two new coadjutors, Messrs. William and Louis Dindorf, have produced the first number of B. We have looked through this number as carefully as the time would permit, and have to congratulate M. Hase on a very considerable improvement. Had the three earlier numbers been managed with equal care and judgment, much of the censure which we have thought it our painful duty to inflict would have been spared. The Messrs. Dindorf have skilfully dovetailed some very excellent emendations and additions into the original matter. A little more concentration and abridgment might have been better; but the improvement is such that we must be satisfied with the present, and look forward to the future with the hope of its further increase. M. Hase, too, comes but seldom on the stage with his ecclesiastical quotations, and Ast's Plato has entirely disappeared; we hope, is not entirely neglected. We would hope, too, that the Messrs. Dindorf will not overlook Passow's lexicon as their predecessors have done. Etymology they seem to have almost forgotten. The purchasers of the Thesaurus, will, therefore, learn with pleaVOL. LI. NO. CI. sure,

N

undermined the social and political system of ancient France; but they hid themselves before the men of the pike, and slowly and servilely crawled to light again only to prostrate themselves before the men of the sword, who, in the natural course of the revolutionary cycle, erected out of the ruins of former governments a military despotism. During this long series of political change, while everything else was assuming new forms and deviating into unexplored routes, literature alone adhered to its ancient traditions, and the critical dogmas of the age of Louis XIV. were, with little variation, in full force on the day of the downfall of Napoleon. The reason of this was two-fold: first, that until the Restoration, France never really enjoyed anything like freedom of the press; and secondly, that, up to the same period, men's minds were irresistibly engrossed by, and their energies directed to, more practical objects; political ambition and military enthusiasm absorbed almost all the talents of the nation; and those who in a state of liberty and peace would have exerted the vigour of their characters in opening new paths of literature, were obliged to seek their fortunes in the public offices, or in the ranks of the army, We speak, of course, only of imaginative or popular literature, -that which more immediately appeals to, and depends upon public opinion and the nature of the government. The higher sciences are cultivated by a small class of recluses, who, in the safe obscurity of the study, are little affected by political changes; and the more practical branches are excited, if not encouraged, by rapid changes in the social system. Geometry, therefore, and physics pursued their silent and equable courses, while chemistry, geology, medicine, and all the utilitarian class of studies, partook in some degree of the general movement; but novels, poetry, and the drama, were repressed and restricted to their old paths-under the republic by fear-and under the empire by a better disguised, but not less effective, coercion by that power which has been so well characterized as an iron hand in a velvet glove! But whatever may be thought of the theory by which we account for it, the fact is equally certain and curious, that the popular literature of France has, from the reign of Louis

sure, that by contraction and concentration of matter this number contains nearly twice as much—or, we should rather say, advances nearly twice as far in the same number of pages-as either of the former three. Still, however, computing the length of the work by the diminished scale of this number, it will be, at least, twice as long as the Prospectus gave reason to expect; nor do we see how it can be brought at all within anything like the promised size, without injury to the work, unless the plan be altered so as to omit all those hundreds of names of persons and places, most of them quite uninteresting, which now occupy so large a space. And then, after all, what between the different relays of editors, and their different modifications of the original plan, what an incongruous whole must poor Stephanus become!

XIV. to that of Louis XVIII., exhibited, amidst the wonderful mutability of that volcanic century, little alteration in its principles, and little novelty in its productions.

The Restoration did not, at first, effect any sensible change. Though the press was freer than it had ever been before, it was still subject to the censorship of the government; and the first tendency of a return to legitimate monarchy was to give additional authority to the literary doctrines of l'ancien régime-the circumstances which recalled to power the descendants of Louis XIV. naturally revived the influence of the admirers of Boileau and Racine.

But a state of freedom, the first France had ever known, and a state of tranquillity, the first she had experienced for fifty years, soon began to operate on the minds of the literary youth. The censure politique became every day less rigid, and the censure littéraire of Geoffroy, Martainville, and other periodical critics of the old school, having wholly vanished, considerable deviations from the beaten tracks were soon observable. These deviations became more frequent and more striking as the authority of Charles X. declined under the pressure of the various engines which were directed against it, and as the students in the different professions, and particularly the young littérateurs, began to find that they were a power in the state.

There had been for some years two schools in French literature, which they chose to designate as the Classical and the Romantic; the Classicals adhered to the elegant regularity of Boileau, Racine, and Voltaire; the Romantics professed to imitate the livelier independence of the Germans and the English. The Classicals were the Roman Catholics of literature-they reverenced a kind of papal infallibility in Aristotle and his successors, and, by too rigorous an adherence to antiquated errors and abuses, brought into contempt a system, which, though originally founded in nature and truth, was disfigured by absurd formalities and incredible fictions. On the other hand, the Romantics, like the Calvinists, pushed their contempt of the ancient authority so far, that, in eradicating the errors, they sacrificed many of the decencies of the old school, and have at length, since the Revolution of July 1830, run into all the immoral and mischievous extravagance of freethinking. But as it was in religion-so it is in literature:-there was and is a happy mean-which we flatter ourselves England has had the good taste to discover, and the good sense to adopt-between the antiquated formalities of the old school, and the extravagant licence of the new-but the French nation is not fitted for a juste milieu-its literature divided itself into the Classical and the Romantic-which might better be denominated the pedantic and the extravagant

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but no one amongst them seems to have once thought of the Natural! and it is not a little amusing to see that, while the Pedantics called Shakspeare a buffoon, the Romantics have outHeroded Herod, and exaggerated into monstrous absurdities all the errors with which the old classical critics used to reproach the great Poet of nature.

This slight sketch of the progress of modern French literature -which we at present have neither time nor space to explain as it deserves-will prepare our readers for an examination of some of the most fashionable productions of the present Parisian stage. We shall confine our observations to the drama, because, as being the most popular walk of literature, it affords the best test of the new taste of the nation, and it supplies also examples of that taste, more striking-we may add, more astonishing-than even their poetry and their novels ;-both of which, however—and particularly the latter exhibit the same extravagance, absurdity, and immorality which we shall have to reprobate in their drama.

We are induced to undertake this subject less by literary than by moral considerations. The English public, which cares so little about its own stage, cares still less about that of our neighbours-but there is something in the general aspect of the modern French theatre which indicates so irregular a state of society, that the matter seems to belong rather to politics than to criticism; and we propose to examine a series of the extraordinary productions of the last three years, less with a view to their individual merits, than to the general effects and ultimate tendency of the whole.

The two authors who, both in novels and plays, (but at present we shall confine ourselves to the latter,) have pushed extravagance farthest, and who are, of course, the most popular dramatists in France, are Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. They also exhibit the gradations by which men with more talents than taste, and more power than judgment, are led to outbid not only one another, but themselves, when they have once commenced the career of vulgar popularity.

Hugo began with Hernani, and Dumas with Henry III., which we still think their best works. They both have enough of the Romantic character-enough of that vivacity which disregards the tame unities of time and place-enough of the spirit which seeks for interest on the extreme verge of possibility-enough of extravagant sentiments and of extraordinary situations; but without that gross dereliction of decency, that abandonment of all moral principle, that unhappy curiosity after the worst and most scandalous motives of human actions, which mark in successive gradations their subsequent works-like opium-eaters who begin with a moderate and exhilarating portion, but increase the successive

doses

doses till they reach intoxication, fury, debility, and idiotcy. Hernani and Henry III. (under the title of Catherine of Cleves) have been some time before the English public in the excellent translation of Lord Francis Egerton. With them, therefore, we may suppose our readers are acquainted; at all events they do not fall within our present scope-they belong to the Restoration; and it is the reign of Louis Philippe that has engendered the monsters which it is our purpose to exhibit.

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Some considerations, however, which bear on the ulterior question, are suggested by these earlier dramas. Henry III.' is in prose, while Hernani' appears in the old court-dress of rhyme. Lord Francis, in his translations, gives the first in blank verse, but in the second, he has adhered to his original even to the rhyme, for which, in his prologue, he offers the following apology :

'Yet the time was when that strange path along
Great Dryden rolled the chariot wheels of song,
And forced his coursers, of ethereal race,
With necks rhymed up to modulate their pace.
Our Gallic neighbours long to that control
Have bowed each varied passion of the soul-
The loftiest, humblest, lightest. Not in vain
Let me, then, sue for leave to clank the chain
Racine and Dryden forged in years of yore ;
Which in our later age great Talma wore-
Wore with such grace, that though 'twere plain to see
It chafed, we scarce could wish the captive free.'—

pp. 119, 120. These are good verses, but we can by no means concur in this opinion. Rhyme unnecessarily adds another to the improbabilities inseparable from the stage. It is hard enough, even when the persons speak plain prose, to maintain the scenic illusion-still harder when they talk blank verse; but rhyme-if uttered so as to be perceptible-heightens the improbability; and, when it is not perceptible to the ear, it increases the difficulty, and fetters the powers of the writer for no adequate object. It is but justice to Lord Francis to admit that he has done all that it was possible to do his rhymed version is at once exact and spirited; and the mere English reader who may wish to see the most perfect approximation to the peculiarities of a French play that our language affords, will read, with great pleasure, this translation of Hernani,

But, even in France, the reign of rhyme is past: its trammels were quite inconsistent with the freedom of the new school; and Hugo, Dumas, and their imitators, have gradually thrown them off, and with them all regularity, all order-we may almost add

all

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