had it not been named to her; she then knew from her geographical information, that it was separated from England by a narrow channel only.

Every one was anxious to witness the lively impression made on the mind of the young and susceptible foreigner, by scenes and objects so new to her apprehension, as those which now presented themselves, and the mornings were devoted to shewing her public exhibitions of all that the arts had assembled in London; but the taste of Ida was that of a greek, formed upon the principles of that nation, from which she never swerved.

She had acquired her judgment in the school of Phidias, amidst the ruins of the Parthenon. And she had stu

died the forms and colouring of nature, under the influence of an Ionian climate. She was not therefore to be deceived; she knew that she breathed the chilly air of the north; and that she lived in a country of commerce, where the feelings themselves were subject to the laws of calculation, and where the oppulence that rewards cannot inspire genius. The perfection of art, is the imitation of nature in her finest forms and purest tints, because good taste is then combined with superiority of execution; but nature is found most worthy of imitation in those regions, where the natural ardor of the human character produces that enthusiasm so indispensible and so nutritive to a love and a pursuit of the fine arts. It was thus that Greece was the rival of nature herself, until moral causes counteracted complexional in

fluence. It was thus that Italy alone became the rival of Greece. Holland produced a Vandyke, but it could never produce a Raphael; for his genius belonged only to a region where the passions betray themselves without reserve; and where objects of exquisite beauty, or high sublimity, give to genius those images which form its finest inspiration.

Ida was surprised to observe the listless languor that hung on the countenances of the crowded spectators that filled the exhibition, even when their attention was rivetted on some picture they seemed to approve" It appears," said she, as if the admiration that flowed involuntarily from the mind, froze as it passed through the chilling medium of the manner."

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The friends of the young athenian took her to the theatres, and were disappointed to find that her surprise and delight did not equal their expecta

tions.

There is a middle age, when society stands half way between infancy and refinement, an age in which the rudiments of nature, wholly effaced, are not yet sought after by the impulse of taste or reason; when education, partial and limited, is confined to the few, and even in their possession is clogged with errors, and obscured by prejudices; when poverty of mind, coarseness of feeling, the want of a power of abstract combination, and the disordered wildness of a rude and wandering fancy, reduce the intercourses of life to the suppliance of mutual wants, or the detail of improbable traditions; when man is destitute of

dependence upon his own intellectual resources, or of an intellectual sympathy with others.

Such is the age when the drama receives the warmest devotion. In ages such as this, the car of Thespis was surrounded by a delighted multitude, the plays of Ennius were received with rapturous applause, and the coarse rude pieces of early English dramatists were given in the forenoon to a crowded audience and graced by presence of royalty itself.

the

But in that splendid and polished era, when athens had reached the summit of her greatness, and stood unrivalled in her genius and refinement, personal malignity was resorted to, to rouse the slumbering taste of the drama into being, and those who had long deserted the theatres, returned only to