stance.

His friend, Arthur Murphy, had sent to him, as a present, his translation of the works of Tacitus, a writer of inimitable force and effect; but as his sense was profound, and his remarks far from obvious, he seems to have become the father of a style so curt and oracular that he needs meditation as much for the terms he uses, as the matter pressed upon our reflection. Mr. Burke thus expresses himself: "There is a style which daily gains ground amongst us, which I should be sorry to see farther advanced by the authority of a writer of your just reputation. The tendency of the mode to which I allude is to establish two very different idioms amongst us, and to introduce a marked distinction between the English that is written and the English that is spoken. This practice, if grown a little more general, would confirm this distemper (such I must think it) in our language, and perhaps render it incurable.

"From this feigned manner, or falsetto (as I think the musicians call something of the same sort in singing), no one modern historian, Robertson only excepted, is perfectly free. It is assumed, I know, to give dignity and variety to the style; but whatever success the attempt may sometimes

have, it is always obtained at the expense of purity, and of the graces that are natural and appropriate to our language.

"It is true that when the occasion calls for auxiliaries of all sorts, and common language becomes unequal to the demands of extraordinary thoughts, something ought to be conceded to the necessities which make 'ambition virtue.' But the allowances to necessities ought not to grow into a practice. Those portents and prodigies ought not to grow too common. Tacitus and the writers of his time have fallen into that vice by aiming at a poetical style. It is true that eloquence in both modes of rhetoric is fundamentally the same; but the manner of handling is totally different, even where words and phrases may be transferred from the one of these departments to the other."

The judicious reader will have no difficulty whatever in applying the above delightful criticism to the declamation on our stage- he will see the occasional necessities for adopting a cadence removed from that of conversation, for the sake of eloquence, but see at the same time that such an innovation must not grow into practice. The poet's ambition (not always virtue) urges him continually to raise his matter by the melody of

numbers, and although blank verse, properly constructed, is not too far from usual language, yet, if the actor forces it into a song, and either moans it out in a uniform chant, or parades his words like military steps, in slow, quick, or double-quick time, as they tend to excite attention, or vehement applause to himself, he will interpret truly neither nature nor his author, but stamp his own character as a mannerist, and beget a false taste in his audience. Some of our old comedies, those of Shakespeare, Fletcher, Jonson, and Massinger, have much of the dialogue written in blank verse. I have always observed that the comic actors delivered it without an appearance of stiffness, and they appeared to be talking it as their natural speech, while their tragic brethren, in the same play, and in the same scene, assumed Burke's falsetto invariably, and with an air of superiority, too, which the very attempt forfeited altogether.

The fact is, that Sheridan's ear was made up to this artificial cadence in the drama. His own declamation was of the old school; and when you read either his "School for Scandal" or his

Critic," you discover the tune to which, like a composer, he had set every line in them. Accord

ingly, a natural actress, like Mrs. Jordan, was all

abroad in this antithetic and pointed speech; it did not suit her manner, and was against her judgment or her feeling, whichever you call it, and in Sheridan's opinion, which I know was a sincere one, she could not "speak a line" of Cora. But she felt the situations keenly, and played with as much zeal as could be wished. Kemble, in fact, had all that was really worth anything in the play, and with Charles Moor from the "Robbers" of Schiller, and his own favourite figures from the speeches against Hastings, the English cast of Rolla might be said to be greatly improved from its original condition by the labours of the great orator.

Sheridan knew his own value, and that a few lines from his pen, without the slightest relation to the subject of the piece, would be preferred to the apposite employment of any other pen. So King spoke a prologue about the "Bucephalus of Rotten Row," "insidiously provoking a caper," and other choice matters, and Mr. Lamb, advisedly in the epilogue, made Mrs. Jordan recapitulate the sorrows of the Stranger and Mrs. Haller, the no less tender truth of Rolla, and the maternal distraction of Cora, alike proceeding from the pen of the now industrious manager.

That was done with this play, that I do not

know to have been achieved in any other. With the single intervention of Thursday, the 30th of May, when the "Secret" and "Bluebeard" were acted, the health and strength of the performers lasted through thirty-one repetitions of "Pizarro," a piece of more than common difficulty, in the business merely of the stage. Sheridan had all his company now cordially with him, and could he, late as it was in his management, have even now weaned himself from politics, and turned his powers to the mere improvement of German plays, he had saved his property and himself alike from ruin.

Kemble, by his two efforts of the Stranger and Rolla, now might be said to command the management, if he chose it, I had almost said the theatre, and it was settled that he was, at all events, in September next, to resume the one, and make his proposals as to a share of the other. Wroughton, as a manager, had clearly no resources; he was diligent and manly, but he was inferior, both as an actor and a man of reading, to Kemble, and it seemed absurd that the latter should be in the company at all, unless he directed it. His brother Charles, too, was now of no slight consequence, either to the theatre or his brother. In the youthful husband of Cora, he had greatly distinguished