With equal wish, desirous to be gone, She gets into the coach, and then she cries -"Drive on!" THUMB. With those last words 134 he vomited his soul, Which, 135 like whipped cream, the devil will swallow down. Bear off the body, and cut off the head, 40 Rebellion's dead, and now I'll go to break (NOODLE. Oh! monstrous, dreadful, terri KING, HUNCAMUNCA, Courtiers KING. Open the prisons, set the wretched free, As life; and when life's gone, I'll hold this last; 131 A rising vapor rumbling in my brains. 137 Here is a visible conjunction of two days in one, by which our author may have either intended an emblem of a wedding, or to insinuate that men in the honey-moon are apt to imagine time shorter than it is. It brings into my mind a passage in the comedy called The Coffee-House Politician [Fielding's]: We will celebrate this day at my house to-morrow. 138 These beautiful phrases are all to be found in one single speech of King Arthur, or The British Worthy. 139 I was but teaching him to grace his tale With decent horror. Cleomenes QUEEN. Not so much in a swoon but I have still Strength to reward the messenger of ill news. (Kills NOODLE) NOODLE. Oh! I am slain. CLEORA. My lover's killed, I will revenge him.so. (Kills the QUEEN) 40 HUNCAMUNCA. My mamma killed! le murtheress, beware. (Kills CLEORA) DOODLE. This for an old grudge to thy heart! (Kills HUNCAMUNCA) MUSTACHA. And this I drive to thine, O Doodle! for a new one. (Kills DOODLE) KING. Ha! murtheress vile, take that. (Kills MUSTACHA) 140 And take thou this. (Kills himself, and falls) 140 We may say with Dryden, Death did at length so many slain forget, And left the tale, and took them by the great. I know of no tragedy which comes nearer to this charming and bloody catastrophe than Cleomenes, where the curtain covers five principal characters dead on the stage. These lines too I asked no questions then, of who killed who? The bodies tell the story as they lieseem to have belonged more properly to this scene of our author; nor can I help imagining they were originally his. The Rival Ladies, too, seem beholden to this scene: We're now a chain of lovers linked in death; No scene, I believe, ever received greater honors than this. It was applauded by several encores, a word very unusual in tragedy. And it was very difficult for the actors to escape without a second slaughter. This I take to be a lively assurance of that fierce spirit of liberty which remains among us, and which Mr. Dryden, in his Essay on Dramatic Poetry, hath observed: "Whether custom," says he, "hath so insinuated itself into our countrymen, or nature hath so formed them to fierceness, I know not; but they will scarcely suffer combats and other objects of horror to be taken from them." And indeed I am for having them encouraged in this martial disposition: nor do I believe our victories over the French have been owing to anything more than to those bloody spectacles daily exhibited in our tragedies, of which the French stage is so entirely clear. THE LONDON MERCHANT; OR, THE HISTORY OF GEORGE BARNWELL BY GEORGE LILLO Learn to be wise from others' harm, DRAMATIS PERSONE MEN THOROWGOOD BARNWELL, uncle to George GEORGE BARN WELL TRUEMAN BLUNT [JAILER] [JOHN] WOMEN MARIA MILLWOOD LUCY Old Ballad of The Lady's Fall Officers with their Attendants, Keeper, and SCENE: London and an adjacent village [DEDICATION] TO SIR JOHN EYLES, BARONET, MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT FOR, AND ALDERMAN OF THE CITY OF LONDON, AND SUB-Governor of tHE SOUTH SEA COMPANY Sir, If Tragic Poetry be, as Mr. Dryden has somewhere said, the most excellent and most useful Lind of writing, the more extensively useful the moral of any tragedy is, the more excellent that piece must be of its kind. I hope I shall not be thought to insinuate that this, to which I have presumed to prefix your name, is such; that depends on its fitness to answer the end of tragedy, the exciting of the passions in order to the correcting such of them as are criminal, either in their nature, or through their excess. Whether the following scenes do this in any tolerable degree, is, with the deference that becomes one who would not be thought vain, submitted to your candid and impartial judgment. What I would infer is this, I think, evident truth; that tragedy is so far from losing its dignity by being accommodated to the circumstances of the generality of mankind that it is more truly august in proportion to the extent of its influence and the numbers that are properly affected by ititas -as it is more truly great to be the instrument of good to many who stand in need of our assistance, than to a very small part of that number. If princes, etc. were alone liable to misfortunes arising from vice or weakness in themselves or others, there would be good reason for confining the characters in tragedy to those of superior rank; but, since the contrary is evident, nothing can be more reasonable than to proportion the remedy to the disease. I am far from denying that tragedies, founded on any instructive and extraordinary events in history, or a well-invented fable, where the persons introduced are of the highest rank, are without their use, even to the bulk of the audience. The strong contrast between a Tamerlane and a Bajazet,1 may have its weight with an unsteady people, and contribute to the fixing of them in the interest of a prince of the character of the former, when, thro' their own levity or the arts of designing men, they are rendered factious and uneasy, tho' they have the highest reason to be satisfied. The sentiments and ex1 In Marlowe's play. ample of a Cato may inspire his spectators with a just sense of the value of liberty, when they see that honest patriot prefer death to an obligation from a tyrant who would sacrifice the constitution of his country and the liberties of mankind, to his ambition or revenge. I have attempted, indeed, to enlarge the province of the graver kind of poetry, and should be glad to see it carried on by some abler hand. Plays founded on moral tales in private life may be of admirable use, by carrying conviction to the mind with such irresistible force as to engage all the faculties and powers of the soul in the cause of virtue, by stifling vice in its first principles. They who imagine this to be too much to be attributed to tragedy, must be strangers to the energy of that noble species of poetry. Shakespeare, who has given such amazing proofs of his genius, in that as well as in comedy, in his Hamlet has the following lines: Had he the motive and the cause for passion And farther, in the same speech: I've heard that guilty creatures at a play Have, by the very cunning of the scene, Been so struck to the soul, that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions. Prodigious! yet strictly just. But I shan't take up your valuable time with my remarks; only give me leave just to observe, that he seems so firmly persuaded of the power of a well-wrote1 piece to produce the effect here ascribed to it, as to make Hamlet venture his soul on the event, and rather trust that than a messenger from the other world, tho' it assumed, as he expresses it, his noble father's form, and assured him that it was his spirit. "I'll have," says Hamlet, "grounds more relative"; The Play's the thing, Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King. Such plays are the best answers to them who deny the lawfulness of the stage. Considering the novelty of this attempt, I thought it would be expected from me to say something in its excuse; and I was unwilling to lose the opportunity of saying something of the usefulness of tragedy in general, and what may 1 Common errors in verb forms during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. be reasonably expected from the farther improvement of this excellent kind of poetry. Sir, I hope you will not think I have said too much of an art, a mean specimen of which I am ambitious enough to recommend to your favor and protection. A mind conscious of superior worth, as much despises flattery as it is above it. Had I found in myself an inclination to so contemptible a vice, I should not have chose1 Sir John Eyles for my patron. And indeed the best-writ panegyric, tho' strictly true, must place you in a light much inferior to that in which you have long been fixed by the love and esteem of your fellow citizens, whose choice of you for one of their representatives in Parliament has sufficiently declared their sense of your merit. Nor hath the knowledge of your worth been confined to the City. The proprietors in the South Sea Company, in which are included numbers of persons as considerable for their rank, fortune, and understanding as any in the kingdom, gave the greatest proof of their confidence in your capacity and probity when they chose you Sub-Governor of their Company at a time when their affairs were in the utmost confusion and their properties in the greatest danger. Nor is the Court insensible of your importance. I shall not therefore attempt your character, nor pretend to add anything to a reputation so well established. Whatever others may think of a dedication wherein there is so much said of other things, and so little of the person to whom it is addressed, I have reason to believe that you will the more easily pardon it on that very account. I am, sir, Your most obedient |