the shoulders of John Kemble, will I fear fall to the ground; nor do I think Mr. Kean likely to pick it up again, with dauntless ambition or stoic pride, like that of Coriolanus. He could not play Cato (at least think not) for the same reason that he will play Coriolanus. He can always play a living man; he cannot play a lifeless statue.

'

Dryden's plays have not come down to us, except in the collection of his printed works. The last of them that was on the list of regular acting plays was 'Don Sebastian.' 'The Mask of Arthur and Emmeline' was the other day revived at one of our theatres without much success. 'Alexander the Great' is by Lee, who wrote some things in conjunction with Dryden, and who had far more power and passion of an irregular and turbulent kind, bordering upon constitutional morbidity, and who might have done better things (as we see from his Edipus') had not his genius been perverted and rendered worse than abortive by carrying the vicious manner of his age to the greatest excess. Dryden's plays are perhaps the fairest specimen of what this manner was. I do not know how to describe it better than by saying that it is one continued and exaggerated common-place. All the characters are put into a swaggering attitude of dignity, and tricked out in the pomp of ostentatious drapery. The images are extravagant, yet not far-fetched; they are outrageous caricatures of obvious thoughts; the language oscillates between bombast and pathos: the characters are noisy pretenders to virtue, and shallow boasters in vice; the versification is laboured and monotonous, quite unlike the admirably free and flowing rhyme of his satires, in which he felt the true inspiration of his subject, and could find modulated sounds to express it. Dryden had no dramatic genius either in tragedy or comedy. In his plays he mistakes blasphemy for sublimity, and ribaldry for wit. He had so little notion of his own powers, that he has put Milton's 'Paradise Lost' into dramatic rhyme to make Adam look like a fine gentleman; and has added a double love-plot to The Tempest,' to "relieve the killing languor and over-laboured lassitude" of that solitude of the imagination, in which Shakspeare had left the inhabitants of his Enchanted Island. I will give two passages out of 'Don Sebastian,' in illustration of what I have said above of this mock-heroic style.

Almeyda advising Sebastian to fly from the power of MuleyMoloch, addresses him thus:

"Leave then the luggage of your fate behind;
To make your flight more easy, leave Almeyda.
Nor think me left a base, ignoble prey,
Exposed to this inhuman tyrant's lust.
My virtue is a guard beyond my strength;
And death my last defence within my call."

Sebastian answers very gravely:

"Death may be called in vain, and cannot come:
Tyrants can tie him up from your relief:
Nor has a Christian privilege to die.

Alas, thou art too young in thy new faith:
Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls,
And give them furloughs for another world:
But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand,

In starless nights, and wait the appointed hour."

Sebastian then urging her to prevent the tyrant's designs by an instant marriage, she says:

""Tis late to join, when we must part so soon.

Sebastian. Nay, rather let us haste it, ere we part:

Our souls, for want of that acquaintance here,

May wander in the starry walks above,

And, forced on worse companions, miss ourselves."

In the scene with Muley-Moloch, where she makes intercession for Sebastian's life, she says:

"My father's, mother's, brother's death I pardon:
That's somewhat sure, a mighty sum of murder,
Of innocent and kindred blood struck off.

My prayers and penance shall discount for these,
And beg of Heaven to charge the bill on me:
Behold what price I offer, and how dear
To buy Sebastian's life.

Emperour. Let after-reckonings trouble fearful fools;
I'll stand the trial of those trivial crimes:

But since thou begg'st me to prescribe my terms,

The only I can offer are thy love;

And this one day of respite to resolve.

Grant or deny, for thy next word is Fate;
And Fate is deaf to prayer.

Almeyda. May heav'n be so

At thy last breath to thine: I curse thee not:
For who can better curse the plague or devil
Than to be what they are?

That curse be thine.
Now do not speak, Sebastian, for you need not,
But die, for I resign your life: Look, heav'n,
Almeyda dooms her dear Sebastian's death!
But is there heaven, for I begin to doubt ?

The skies are hush'd; no grumbling thunders roll:
Now take your swing, ye impious: sin, unpunish'd.
Eternal Providence seems over-watch'd,

These passages, with many like them, will be found in the first scene of the third act.

The occasional striking expressions, such as that of souls at the resurrection "fumbling for their limbs," are the language of strong satire and habitual disdain, not proper to tragic or serious poetry.

After Dryden there is no writer that has acquired much reputation as a tragic poet for the next hundred years. In the hands of his successors, the Smiths, the Hughes, the Hills, the Murphys, the Dr. Johnsons, of the reigns of the first Georges, tragedy seemed almost afraid to know itself, and certainly did not stand where it had done a hundred and fifty years before. It had degenerated by regular and studied gradations into the most frigid, insipid, and insignificant of all things. It faded to a shade, it tapered to a point, "fine by degrees, and beautifully less." I do not believe there is a single play of this period which could be read with any degree of interest or even patience, by a modern reader of poetry, if we except the productions of Southern, Lillo and Moore, the authors of The Gamester,'

Oroonoko,' and 'Fatal Curiosity,' and who, instead of mounting on classic stilts and making rhetorical flourishes, went out of the established road to seek for truth and nature and effect in the commonest life and lowest situations. In short, the only tragedy of this period is that to which their productions gave a name, and which has been called in contradistinction by the French, and with an express provision for its merits and defects, the Tragédie bourgeoise.' An anecdote is told of the first of these writers by Gray, in one of his letters, dated from Horace Walpole's country-seat, about the year 1740, who says, "Old Mr. Southern is here, who is now above 80; a very agreeable old man, at least I think so when I look in his face, and think of Isabella and Oroonoko." It is pleasant to see these traits of attachment and gratitude kept up in successive generations of poets to one another, and also to find that the same works of genius that have "sent us weeping to our beds,” and made us "rise sadder and wiser on the morrow morn,” have excited just the same fondness of affection in others before we were born; and it is to be hoped will do so after we are dead. Our best feelings, and those on which we pride ourselves most, and with most reason, are perhaps the commonest of all others.

Up to the present reign, and during the best part of it (with another solitary exception, Douglas,' which, with all its feebleness and extravagance, has in its style and sentiments a good deal of poetical and romantic beauty,) Tragedy wore the face of the Goddess of Dulness in the Dunciad,' serene, torpid, sickly, lethargic and affected, till it was roused from its trance by the blast of the French Revolution, and by the loud trampling of the German Pegasus on the English stage, which now appeared as pawing to get free from its ancient trammels, and rampant shook off the incumbrance of all former examples, opinions, prejudices, and principles. If we have not been alive and well since this period, at least we have been alive, and it is better to be alive than dead. The German tragedy (and our own, which is only a branch of it,) aims at effect, and produces it often in the highest degree; and it does this by going all the lengths not only of instinctive feeling, but of speculative opinion, and startling the hearer by overturning all the established maxims of society, and

setting at nought all the received rules of composition. It cannot be said of this style that in it "decorum is the principal thing.” It is the violation of decorum that is its first and last principle, the beginning, middle, and end. It is an insult and defiance to Aristotle's definition of tragedy. The action

is not grave, but extravagant: the fable is not probable, but improbable: the favourite characters are not only low, but vicious: the sentiments are such as do not become the person into whose mouth they are put, nor that of any other person : the language is a mixture of metaphysical jargon and flaring prose: the moral is immorality. In spite of all this, a German tragedy is a good thing. It is a fine hallucination: it is a noble madness, and as there is a pleasure in madness which none but madmen know, so there is a pleasure in reading a German play to be found in no other. The world have thought so: they go to see 'The Stranger,' they go to see 'Lovers' Vows,' and 'Pizarro,' they have their eyes wide open all the time, and almost cry them out before they come away, and therefore they go again. There is something in the style that hits the temper of men's minds; that, if it does not hold the mirror up to nature, yet "shows the very age and body of the time, its form and pressure." It embodies, it sets off and aggrandizes in all the pomp of action, in all the vehemence of hyperbolical declamation, in scenery, in dress, in music, in the glare of the senses, and the glow of sympathy, the extreme opinions which are floating in our time, and which have struck their roots deep and wide below the surface of the public mind. We are no longer as formerly, heroes in warlike enterprize; martyrs to religious. faith; but we are all the partisans of a political system, and devotees to some theory of moral sentiments. The modern style of tragedy is not assuredly made up of pompous common-place, but it is a tissue of philosophical, political, and moral paradoxes. I am not saying whether these paradoxes are true or false: all that I mean to state is, that they are utterly at variance with old opinions, with established rules and existing institutions; that it is this tug of war between the inert prejudice and the startling novelty which is to batter it down (first on the stage of the theatre, and afterwards on the stage of the world,) that gives the