sobriety."-Some low fellow." No objection to look after a horse, or to go behind a carriage, no objection to town or country." (Rising, throws the paper from him.)- No objection!"-Now this is the way masters and mistresses is spoilt and set up by these pitiful, famishing, out of place rascals, that makes no objection to nothing.-Well, thank my stars and myself, I'm none of your wants-a-sitiation scrubs. Enter Blagrave. Bla. How are you, Mr. Popkin?-Do you know where is Mr. Beauchamp, or Mr. St. Albans ? Pop. Not I.-I reckoned they was in the stable with you. Bla. No, they ha'n't been wi' me yet, and I must see master, about his horse Cacafogo. Pop. Harkee, Blag.!-a word with you.-(Holding out his hand.) Touch there, Blag.-Shake hands upon it,-draw together, Coachy, and we two will have it all our own way, above and below stairs. Bla. They say these St. Albans's is rolling in gold. Pop. Aye, quite a West Indian nabob, that the mother has brought over to us here for edication. Bla. And we'll teach him a thing or two.-If he puts up his horses with us, there will be fine doings, I warrant. Pop. And there'll be a brave match for Miss Juliana in due course; and meantime he and our Mr. Beauchamp will be cutting a fine dash about town, for this minor's to have a swinging allowance-may play away as he pleases, if my lord's acting guardian.-This guardianship will be a pretty penny, I warrant, in my lord's pocket, who, between you and I, wants a ready penny as bad as any one man in the house of Lords, or Commons either. Bla. Then that's a bold word, Pop, but I believe you're not much out:-the turf for that.-When's my lord to be up from Newmarket? Pop. I can't say-they expect him to-day; and for sartin, I know my lady's on thorns till he comes, for fear this young heir should slip through their fingers.'-pp. 141-144. 6 Here we have little of the character of genuine comedy. Such conversation may, doubtless, be expected from coachmen and footmen, but does not deserve to be recorded by the pen of Miss Edgeworth. Nothing,' says Johnson, can please long and please many, but just delineations of general nature.' Grammatical inaccuracies paint neither character nor passion: they are proofs merely of ignorance and want of education. They give no pleasure to the reader, and therefore a writer of taste should reject them; they are a work of no difficulty, and therefore a writer of talents should despise them. We are not aware that this drama contains any passages more smart or more elegant than the following. 'Jul. My mamma sighs, and says, in her moralizing tone, Beauty is such a dangerous thing for young girls,"—that it ought to be kept only for old women, I suppose. Then while she is dressing me-no, while she is dressing herself, she is so sentimental about it," My dear Juliana, (mimicking a sentimental tone,) one must be at the trouble of dressing, because one must sacrifice to appearances in this world; but I value only the graces of the mind." Yes, mamma,-(as if spoken aside,) that's the reason you are rouging yourself.—(In the mother's tone.) Beauty after all is such a transient flower."-" So I see, mamma"-(she starts.) Mercy!-here's mamma coming!-I must be found practising.-(Begins to play a serious lesson.) 66 Enter Beauchamp. Beau. Practising, Ju!-Practising for ever!-What a bore! Jul. La! brother, you frightened me so!-I thought it was mamma, and after all 'tis only you. Beau. Only me! That's a good one!-Cool! faith.-But come here now, Ju; if you've any taste, admire me, just as I stand!—from top to toe!-all the go!--Hey? Jul. No, this thing about your neck is horrid-I'll make it right. Jul. As you please; but I assure you, you are all wrong. Jul. At Eton, may be, but not in Lon'on, I can tell you. Beau. You can tell me!-and how should you know, when you are not out yet?' 'Jul. You have no notion what I have been going through all this time here at home in this course of education-a master for every hour, and sometimes two in one hour. Beau. Faith, that's too bad!-to set 'em riding double on your hours!-But why didn't ye kick, or take a sulk, or grow rusty, as Blagrave says? Jul. No use in kicking.-Sulky I was, as ever I could be, but then somehow they coaxed and flattered me out of it. Beau. Aye, flattery !-not a woman or a girl that ever was born can stand flattery, so they had you there, Ju!-Hey ?--and the bear that has danced, is in chains for ever. Jul. That is the misery! Oh, if it had not been for Popkin, who taught me to slip out of my chains, I must have died of the confine ment. Beau. Famous wife you'll make, Ju!-Capital hand you'll be at bamboozling a husband, when you've had such practice. Jul. La! now don't you say that, Beauchamp-don't you say that, or you'll make the young men afraid of me. Beau. Well, I won't tell St. Albans.'-pp. 147-152. These extracts can claim no merit of a very high kind; but they are, at least, lively. It must likewise be admitted that two of the subjects which furnish a great part of the dialogue of this drama, we mean the fashionable mode of educating girls, and the schemes of mothers to promote the marriage of their daughters, seem peculiarly susceptible of being wrought into a form proper for the stage. They would supply very ridiculous situations, as well as most instructive structive lessons, and unfortunately for private happiness and public morals, the perversion of character to which they refer abounds so much in real life, that the dramatic writer would find no lack of originals from which his imagination might derive proper materials. We shall pass more cursorily over the two remaining dramas. They are occupied chiefly with delineations of peculiarities of Irish country life, that do not add much to those amusing pictures which Miss Edgeworth has drawn in some of her earlier works. In 'Love and Law,' she introduces to us an Irish grazier, Macbride by name, with his son Philip, and his daughter Honor. In his neighbourhood lives Catty Rooney, now in a situation not more exalted than Macbride, but proud of her descent from Irish kings, and furious in animosity against the grazier on account of a quarrel concerning a small extent of bog. In spite of these direful feuds, Randal Rooney, Catty's son, loves and is loved by Honor; but their mutual passion is opposed by their respective relations. In the vicinity lives Gerald O'Blaney, a distiller, in embarrassed circumstances, with an outward show of wealth, who wishing, partly from avarice, partly from passion, to marry Honor, employs his servant Pat Coxe to inflame the resentment of the Roonies against the Macbrides. A falsehood, propagated by Coxe, gives rise to a battle between the two parties at a neighbouring fair. The Roonies are routed, and appear before Justice Carver to invoke from the law that vengeance which violence had failed to obtain. The examination before the magistrate is painted in very lively colours. The result of it is, that the complaint of the Roonies is dismissed, and that the lies of Pat Coxe are detected. Catty is then convinced that she has been in the wrong: and, by what startled us as rather too sudden a transformation of character, renounces her feud, together with her claim to the long contested piece of bog. The union of Randal and Honor is the consequence. The characters are sufficiently diversified, and drawn with considerable force. Carver is perhaps loaded with a superfluous quantity of stupidity. 'I protest,' says he on one occasion, where he means to express his deep sympathy with the feelings of those around him, ' I protest that it almost makes me blow my nose.' It would be absurd to criticise minutely the dialogue of a piece, in which Mrs. Carver is the only person who speaks English: for we cannot give that epithet to the jargon uttered by her husband: yet the language of some of the personages is occasionally unnatural. By all the pride of man and vanity of woman' is a very pretty antithetical oath for the uneducated son of an Irish grazier! O'Blaney is represented as a man of ingenuity, but his ingenuity is all exerted in puns and metaphors. He tells us that it is a troublesome occupation to take the inventory of your stock, when you are re duced duced to invent the stock itself,' and that a distiller can never be dejected, because he has always proof spirits.' He is quite the Catiline of distillers and loves the danger of fraud for its own sake. 'I'd desire no better sport, (he says,) than to hear the whole pack (of excisemen) in full cry after me, and I doubling and doubling, and safe at my form at last, with you, Pat, my precious, to drag the herring over the ground previous to the hunt, to distract the scent and defy the nose of the dogs.' "The Rose and Shamrock' contains many passages, which will be read with interest by those who are partial to pictures of the ruder classes of Irish society. The interior of an Irish inn,—the thoughtless, drunken, yet crafty innkeeper, the affectation and coquetry of his half educated daughter,-the active good nature of the servant-are delineated with no small vivacity. The Scotchman and the Englishman, who are introduced, are very good and very dull they are evidently drawn according to an abstract notion which Miss Edgeworth has formed of the respective national characters of England and Scotland, and not from an actual survey of individuals. The plot is meagre and imperfect. On the style we have the same remark to make as on 'Love and Law,'-that the dialogue is for the most part, not English, but, if we may use the expression, Anglo-Irish. This, however, we are as far from noting as a fault, as from blaming the Scottish dialect in the 'Tales of my Landlord.' The coarse violations of grammar, which we condemned in the Two Guardians,' by no means stand upon the same footing for, first, national peculiarities of dialect are essential to a faithful representation of national manners, or at least, add much to its force; whereas the gross vulgarities of the lowest of the rabble can never give a dramatic picture any new power of pleasing; and secondly, it would be absurd to put pure English into the mouth of Catty Rooney, or an Irish boor; but by no means so to make Lady Courtington's smart footmen speak with tolerable cor : rectness. The sketch which we have given of this work and our extracts from it, will probably induce our readers to conclude, that it is a book which may be read with amusement and which yet does not demand great praise. Miss Edgeworth has too much good sense to write ill, though she has not the peculiar talent which dramatic composition requires. The rarity of this talent is truly wonderful. We cannot ascribe it to poverty of genius in the present age. In the walks both of science and of imagination we can boast of men, which any country and any period might be proud to claim. Neither can it be attributed to the uninteresting nature of the study: for if any mental employment is its own reward, it must be that of fixing in permanent colours the fleeting follies of mankind. Is then the : the comic drama a field where success is scantily recompensed? Far otherwise few productions of genius have been more liberally rewarded than comedies of superior merit. Or shall we say that preceding authors have anticipated us, or that no foibles adapted to the stage remain for us to delineate? Such an opinion would rather be a cause of future sterility than an explanation of that which exists; and might have been maintained before the time of Murphy, Cumberland, and Sheridan, as plausibly as at this moment. If we can imagine that the few good comedies in the English language have exposed all the laughable frailties of our nature, which could instruct and amuse upon the stage, we must be persuaded that mankind are more exempt from weaknesses than any moralist has hitherto taught. We have indeed been told that the progress of education, the extensive intercourse of all classes of men with each other, and the general diffusion of wealth, have removed those peculiarities which comedy delights to trace. Some peculiarities may have been thus removed, but others have been produced such circumstances may alter outward manners, but cannot diminish the variety of human passions and interests.-But this is not a point to be lightly discussed: and we shall find other opportunities of returning to the subject. ART. V.-1. Statements respecting the East India College, with an Appeal to Facts, in refutation of the Charges lately brought against it in the Court of Proprietors. By the Rev. T. R. Malthus, Professor of History and Political Economy in the East India College, Hertfordshire, and late Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. London: Murray. 1817. 2. Minute of the Marquis Wellesley, relative to the College of Fort William, dated the 18th August, 1800. (Asiatic Register, 1800.) ENGLAND has almost always extended her territorial greatness beyond her own narrow pale. It might seem as if an imprescriptible privilege had been conferred on us, of possessing a sort of outer-court of dominion, and as if this magnificent birthright had still prevailed over the tempests of human vicissitude. The loss of the noble provinces which formerly belonged to us on the European continent created a sensible chasm in the magnitude of our possessions. We retreated within our own limits; but this retrogression, if the phrase may be used, of power near home, was gradually repaired by a corresponding advance on the opposite shore of the Atlantic; and the soil which we were compelled to relinquish in Europe, we more than regained in America. Another season |