mechanics; He follows a sedentary trade, and he is accordingly represented as conceited, serious, and fantastical. He is ready to undertake any thing and every thing, as if it was as much a matter of course as the motion of his loom and shuttle. He is for play ing the tyrant, the lover, the lady, the lion. He will roar that it shall do any man's heart good to hear him; and this being objected to as improper, he still has a resource in his good opinion of himself, and will roar you an 'twere any nightingale.' Snug the Joiner is the moral man of the piece, who proceeds by measurement and discretion in all things. You see him with his rule and compasses in his hand. Have you the lion's part written Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am elow of study. You may do it extempore,' says Quince, for it is nothing but roaring.' Starveling the Tailor keeps the peace, and objects to the lion and the drawn sword. I believe we must leave the killing out when all's done.' Starveling, however, does not start the objections himself, but seconds them when made by others, as if he had no spirit to express his fears without encouragement. It is too much to suppose all this intentional: but it very luckily falls out so."-pp. 126, 127.

Mr. H. admires Romeo and Juliet rather too much-though his encomium on it is about the most eloquent part of his performance: But we really cannot sympathise with all the conceits and puerilities that occur in this play; for instance, this exhortation to Night, which Mr. H. has extracted for praise !

"Give me my Romeo-and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine,
That all the world will be in love with Night," &c.

We agree, however, with less reservation, in his rapturous encomium on Lear-but can afford no extracts. The following speculation on the character of Falstaff is a striking, and, on the whole, a favourable specimen of our author's manner.

venison,

never see him at table. He carries his own larder about with him, and he is himself a tun of man.' His pulling out the bottle in the field of battle is a joke to show his contempt for glory accompanied with danger, his systematic adherence to his Epicurean philosophy in the most trying circumstances. Again, such is his deliberate exaggeration of his own vices, that it does not seem quite certain whether the account of his hostess' bill, found in his pocket, with such an out-of-the-way charge for capons and sack with only one half-penny-worth of bread, was not put there by himself, as a trick to humour the jest upon his favourite propensities, and as a conscious caricature of himself.

"The secret of Falstaff's wit is for the most part a masterly presence of mind, an absolute self-possession, which nothing can disturb. His repartees are involuntary suggestions of his self-love; instinc. tive evasions of every thing that threatens to interrupt the career of his triumphant jollity and self-complacency. His very size floats him out of all his difficulties in a sea of rich conceits; and ho turns round on the pivot of his convenience, with every occasion and at a moment's warning. His natural repugnance to every unpleasant thought or circumstance, of itself makes light of objections, and provokes the most extravagant and licentious answers in his own justification. His indifference to truth puts no check upon his invention; and the more improbable and unexpected his contrivances of them, the anticipation of their effect acting as a are, the more happily does he seem to be delivered stimulus to the gaiety of his fancy. The success of one adventurous sally gives him spirits to undertake another: he deals always in round numbers, and his exaggerations and excuses are open, palpable, monstrous as the father that begets them.""" pp. 189-192.

It is time, however, to make an end of this. We are not in the humour to discuss points of learning with this author; and our readers now see well enough what sort of book he has written. We shall conclude with his remarks on Shakespeare's style of Comedy, introduced in the account of the Twelfth Night.

"Wit is often a meagre substitute for pleasure- "This is justly considered as one of the most deable sensation; an effusion of spleen and petty lightful of Shakespeare's comedies. It is full of spite at the comforts of others, from feeling none in sweetness and pleasantry. It is perhaps too gooditself. Falstaff's wit is an emanation of a fine con- natured for comedy. It has little satire, and no stitution; an exuberance of good-humour and good spleen. It aims at the ludicrous rather than the nature; an overflowing of his love of laughter, and ridiculous. It makes us laugh at the follies of good-fellowship; a giving vent to his heart's ease mankind; not despise them, and still less bear any and over-contentment with himself and others.-ill-will towards them. Shakespeare's comic genius He would not be in character if he were not so fat resembles the bee rather in its power of extracting as he is; for there is the greatest keeping in the sweets from weeds or poisons, than in leaving a boundless luxury of his imagination and the pam-sting behind it. He gives the most amusing exagpered self-indulgence of his physical appetites. He geration of the prevailing foibles of his characters, manures and nourishes his mind with jests, as he but in a way that they themselves, instead of being does his body with sack and sugar. He carves out offended at, would almost join in to humour; he his jokes, as he would a capon, or a haunch of rather contrives opportunities for them to show where there is cut and come again: and themselves off in the happiest lights, than renders lavishly pours out upon them the oil of gladness. them contemptible in the perverse construction of His tongue drops fatness, and in the chambers of the wit or malice of others. his brain it snows of meat and drink.' He keeps up perpetual holiday and open house, and we live with him in a round of invitations to a rump and dozen.-Yet we are not left to suppose that he was a mere sensualist. All this is as much in imagination as in reality. His sensuality does not engross and stupify his other faculties, but ascends me into the brain, clears away all the dull, crude vapours that environ it, and makes it full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes.' His imagination keeps up the ball long after his senses have done with it. He seems to have even a greater enjoyment of the freedom from restraint, of good cheer, of his ease. of his vanity, in the ideal and exaggerated descriptions which he gives of them, than in fact. He never fails to enrich his discourse with allusions to eating and drinking; but we

"There is a certain stage of society, in which people become conscious of their peculiarities and absurdities, affect to disguise what they are, and set up pretensions to what they are not. This gives rise to a corresponding style of comedy, the object of which is to detect the disguises of self-love, and to make reprisals on these preposterous assumptions of vanity, by marking the contrast between the real and the affected character as severely as possible, and denying to those, who would impose on us for what they are not, even the merit which they have. This is the comedy of artificial life, of wit and satire, such as we see in Congreve, Wycherley, Vanbrugh, &c. But there is a period in the progress of manners anterior to this, in which the foibles and follies of individuals are of nature's planting, not the growth of art or study; in which they are therefore

(February, 1822.)

Sardanapalus, a Tragedy. The Two Foscari, a Tragedy. Cain, a Mystery. By LORD BYECE 8vo. pp. 440. Murray. London: 1822.*

most likely to be remembered; but none of them, we fear, will ever be ranked with the older worthies; nor is it conceivable that any age should ever class them together.

The exquisite taste and fine observation of imitations, of Schiller and Kotzebue, caricaAddison, produced only the solemn mawkish- tured and distorted as they were by the aberness of Cato. The beautiful fancy, the gor- rations of a vulgar and vitiated taste, had still geous diction, and generous affections of so much of the raciness and vigour of the old Thomson, were chilled and withered as soon English drama, from which they were avowas he touched the verge of the Drama; where edly derived, that they instantly became more his name is associated with a mass of verbose popular in England than any thing that her puerility, which it is difficult to conceive could own artists had recently produced; and served ever have proceeded from the author of the still more effectually to recal our affections to Seasons and the Castle of Indolence. Even their native and legitimate rulers. Then folthe mighty intellect, the eloquent morality, lowed republications of Massinger, and Beauand lofty style of Johnson, which gave too mont and Fletcher, and Ford, and their tragic and magnificent a tone to his ordinary contemporaries-and a host of new tragedies, writing, failed altogether to support him in his all written in avowed and elaborate imitation attempt to write actual tragedy; and Irene is of the ancient models. Miss Baillie, we rather not only unworthy of the imitator of Juvenal think, had the merit of leading the way in this and the author of Rasselas and the Lives of return to our old allegiance--and then came the Poets, but is absolutely, and in itself, a volume of plays by Mr. Chenevix, and a nothing better than a tissue of wearisome succession of single plays, all of considerable and unimpassioned declamations. We have merit, from Mr. Coleridge, Mr. Maturin, Mr. named the most celebrated names in our Wilson, Mr. Barry Cornwall, and Mr. Milman. literature, since the decline of the drama, al-The first and the last of these names are the most to our own days; and if they have neither lent any new honours to the stage, nor borrowed any from it, it is needless to say, that those who adventured with weaker powers had no better fortune. The Mourning Bride of Congreve, the Revenge of Young, and the Douglas of Home [we cannot add the Mysterious Mother of Walpole-even to please Lord Byron], are almost the only tragedies of the last age that are familiar to the present; and they are evidently the works of a feebler and more effeminate generation-indicating, as much by their exaggerations as by their timidity, their own consciousness of inferiority to their great predecessors-whom they affected, however, not to imitate, but to supplant. But the native taste of our people was not thus to be seduced and perverted; and when the wits of Queen Anne's time had lost the authority of living authors, it asserted itself by a fond recurrence to its original standards, and a resolute neglect of the more regular and elaborate dramas by which they had been succeeded. Shakespeare, whom it had long been the fashion to decry and even ridicule, as the poet of a rude and barbarous age, was reinstated in his old supremacy: and when his legitimate progeny could no longer be found at home, his spurious issue were hailed with rapture from foreign countries, and invited and welcomed with the most eager enthusiasm on their arrival. The German

It is not a little remarkable to find such a man as Goldsmith joining in this pitiful sneer. In his Vicar of Wakefield, he constantly represents his famous town ladies. Miss Carolina Amelia Wilhel. mina Skeggs, and the other, as discoursing about "high life, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses!" -And, in a more serious passage, he introduces a player as astonishing the Vicar, by informing him that Dryden and Rowe's manner were quite out of fashion-our taste has gone back a whole century; Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and, above all, the plays of Shakespeare, are the only things that go down." "How!" says the Vicar, "is it possible that the present age can be pleased with that antiquated dialeet, that obsolete humour, and those overcharged characters which abound in the works you mention ? No writer of name, who was not aiming at a paradox, would venture to say this now

We do not mean, however, altogether to deny, that there may be some illusion, in our habitual feelings, as to the merits of the great originals-consecrated as they are, in our imaginations, by early admiration, and associated, as all their peculiarities, and the mere accidents and oddities of their diction now are, with the recollection of their intrinsic excellences. It is owing to this, we suppose, that we can scarcely venture to ask ourselves, steadily, and without an inward startling and feeling of alarm, what reception one of Shakespeare's irregular plays-the Tempest for example, or the Midsummer Night's Dream— would be likely to meet with, if it were now to appear for the first time, without name, notice, or preparation? Nor can we pursue the hazardous supposition through all the possibilities to which it invites us, without something like a sense of impiety and profanation. Yet, though some little superstition may mingle with our faith, we must still believe it to be the true one. Though time may have hallowed many things that were at first but common, and accidental associations imparted a charm to much that was in itself indifferent, we cannot but believe that there was an original sanctity, which time only matured and extended-and an inherent charm from which the association derived all its power. And when we look candidly and calmly to the Works of our early dramatists, it is impossible, we think, to dispute, that after criticism has done its worst on them-after all deductions for impossible plots and fantastical characters, unaccountable forms of speech, and occasional extravagance, indelicacy, and horrors-there is a facility and richness about them, both of thought and of diction-a force of invention, and a depth of sagacity-an originality of conception, and a play of fancy-a nakedness and energy of passion, and, above all, a copiousness of imagery, and a sweetness and flexibility of verse, which is altogether unri

valled, in earlier or in later times;-and places | excessive simplicity. It is in vain to expect the them, in our estimation, in the very highest praises of such people; for they never praise; and foremost place among ancient or modern and it is truly very little worth while to poets.

It is in these particulars that the inferiority of their recent imitators is most apparent-in the want of ease and variety-originality and grace. There is, in all their attempts, whatever may be their other merits or defects, an air of anxiety and labour-and indications, by far too visible, at once of timidity and ambition. This may arise, in part, from the fact of their being, too obviously and consciously, imitators. They do not aspire so much to rival the genius of their originals, as to copy their manner. They do not write as they would have written in the present day, but as they imagine they themselves would have written two hundred years ago. They revive the antique phraseology, repeat the venerable oaths, and emulate the quaint familiarities of that classical period-and wonder that they are not mistaken for new incarnations of its departed poets! One great cause why they are not, is, that they speak an unnatural dialect, and are constrained by a masquerade habit; in neither of which it is possible to display that freedom, and those delicate traits of character, which are the life of the drama, and were among the chief merits of those who once exalted it so highly. Another bad effect of imitation, and especially of the imitation of unequal and irregular models in a critical age, is, that nothing is thought fit to be copied but the exquisite and shining passages from which it results, in the first place, that all our rivalry is reserved for occasions in which its success is most hopeless; and, in the second place, that instances, even of occasional success, want their proper grace and effect, by being deprived of the relief, shading, and preparation, which they would naturally have received in a less fastidious composition; and, instead of the warm and native and evervarying graces of a spontaneous effusion, the work acquires the false and feeble brilliancy of a prize essay in a foreign tongue-a collection of splendid patches of different texture and pattern.!

disarm their censure. It is only the praises of the real lovers of poetry that ever give it true fame or popularity-and these are little affected by the cavils of the fastidious. Yet the genius of most modern writers seems to be rebuked under that of those pragmatical and insignificant censors. They are so much afraid of faults, that they will scarcely venture upon beauties; and seem more anxious in general to be safe, than original. They dare not indulge in a florid and magnificent way of writing, for fear of being charged with bom bast by the cold-blooded and malignant. They must not be tender, lest they should be laughed at for puling and whining; nor discursive and fanciful like their great predecessors, under pain of being held out to derision, as ingenious gentlemen who have dreamed that the gods have made them poetical!

Thus, the dread of ridicule, which they have ever before their eyes, represses all the emotions, on the expression of which their success entirely depends; and in order to escape the blame of those to whom they can give no pleasure, and through whom they can gain no fame, they throw away their best chance of pleasing those who are capable of relishing their excellences, and on whose admiration alone their reputation must at all events be founded. There is a great want of magnanimity, we think, as well as of wisdom, in this sensitiveness to blame; and we are convinced that no modern author will ever write with the grace and vigour of the older ones, who does not write with some portion of their fearlessness and indifference to censure.Courage, in short, is at least as neces sary as genius to the success of a work of imagination; since, without this, it is impossible to attain that freedom and self-possession, without which no talents can ever have fair play, and, far less, that inward con fidence and exaltation of spirit which must accompany all the higher acts of the under standing. The earlier writers had probably less occasion for courage to secure them these advantages; as the public was far less critical in their day, and much more prone to admira tion than to derision: But we can still trace in their writings the indications both of a proud consciousness of their own powers and

At the bottom of all this-and perhaps as its most efficient cause-there lurks, we suspect, an unreasonable and undue dread of criticism;-not the deliberate and indulgent criticism which we exercise, rather for the encouragement of talent than its warning-privileges, and of a brave contempt for the but the vigilant and paltry derision which is perpetually stirring in idle societies, and but too continually present to the spirits of all who aspire to their notice. There is nothing so certain, we take it, as that those who are the most alert in discovering the faults of a work of genius, are the least touched with its beauties. Those who admire and enjoy fine poetry, in short, are quite a different class of persons from those who find out its flaws and defects -who are sharp at detecting a plagiarism or a grammatical inaccuracy, and laudably industrious in bringing to light an obscure passage sneering at an exaggerated one-or wondering at the meaning of some piece of

cavils to which they might expose them-
selves. In our own times, we know but one
writer who is emancipated from this slavish
awe of vulgar detraction-this petty timidity
about being detected in blunders and faults
and that is the illustrious author of Waverley,
and the other novels that have made an era
in our literature as remarkable, and as likely
to be remembered, as any which can yet
traced in its history. We shall not now say
how large a portion of his success we ascribe
to this intrepid temper of his genius; but we
are confident that no person can read
of his wonderful works, without feeling that
their author as utterly careless of the re-

any o

be

one

LORD BYRON'S TRAGEDIES.

proach of small imperfections; disdained the inglorious labour of perpetual correctness, and has consequently imparted to his productions that spirit and ease and variety, which reminds us of better times, and gives lustre and effect to those rich and resplendent passages to which it left him free to aspire.

Lord Byron, in some respects, may appear not to have been wanting in intrepidity. He has not certainly been very tractable to advice, nor very patient of blame. But this, in him, we fear, is not superiority to censure, but aversion to it; and, instead of proving that he is indifferent to detraction, shows only, that the dread and dislike of it operate with more than common force on his mind. A critic, whose object was to give pain, would desire no better proof of the efficacy of his inflictions, than the bitter scorn and fierce defiance with which they are encountered; and the more vehemently the noble author protests that he despises the reproaches that have been bestowed on him, the more certain

As Plays, we are afraid we must also say
that the pieces before us are wanting in inter-
est, character, and action—at least we must
say this of the three last of them-for there is
interest in Sardanapalus-and beauties be-
sides, that make us blind to its other defects.
There is, however, throughout, a want of
dramatic effect and variety; and we suspect
there is something in the character or habit
of Lord Byron's genius which will render this
unattainable. He has too little sympathy with
the ordinary feelings and frailties of humanity,
to succeed well in their representation-His
soul is like a star, and dwells apart." It does
not "hold the mirror up to nature," nor catch
the hues of surrounding objects; but, like a
kindled furnace, throws out its intense glare
and gloomy grandeur on the narrow scene
which it irradiates. He has given us, in his
other works, some glorious pictures of nature
-some magnificent reflections, and some in-
imitable delineations of character: But the
same

it is that he suffers from their severity, and portralings prevail in them all; and his

would be glad to escape, if he cannot overbear, them. But however this may be, we think it is certain that his late dramatic efforts have not been made carelessly, or without anxiety. To us, at least, they seem very elaborate and hard-wrought compositions; and this indeed we take to be their leading characteristic, and the key to most of their peculiarities.

in particular, though a little varied in the drapery and attitude, seem all copied from the same original. His Childe Harold, his Giaour, Conrad, Lara, Manfred, Cain, and Lucifer-are all one individual. There is the same varnish of voluptuousness on the surface-the same canker of misanthropy at the core, of all he touches. He cannot draw the changes of many-coloured life, nor transport himself into the condition of the infinitely diConsidered as Poems, we confess they ap- versified characters by whom a stage should pear to us to be rather heavy, verbose, and be peopled. The very intensity of his feelinelegant--deficient in the passion and energy ings-the loftiness of his views-the pride of which belongs to the other writings of the his nature or his genius-withhold him from noble author and still more in the richness this identification; so that in personating the It would be better for him, we of imagery, the originality of thought, and heroes of the scene, he does little but repeat the sweetness of versification for which he himself. They are for the think, if it were otherwise. We are sure it used to be distinguished, most part solemn. prolix, and ostentatious--would be better for his readers. He would lengthened out by large preparations for catas- get more fame, and things of far more worth trophes that never arrive, and tantalizing us than fame, if he would condescend to a more with slight specimens and glimpses of a extended and cordial sympathy with his felhigher interest, scattered thinly up and down low-creatures; and we should have more many weary pages of declamation. Along variety of fine poetry, and, at all events, betwith the concentrated pathos and homestruck ter tragedies. We have no business to read sentiments of his former poetry, the noble him a homily on the sinfulness of pride and author seems also, we cannot imagine why, uncharity; but we have a right to say, that to have discarded the spirited and melodious it argues a poorness of genius to keep always versification in which they were embodied, to the same topics and persons; and that the and to have formed to himself a measure world will weary at last of the most energetic equally remote from the spring and vigour of pictures of misanthropes and madmen-outhis former compositions, and from the soft- laws and their mistresses! ness and flexibility of the ancient masters of the drama. There are some sweet lines, and many of great weight and energy; but the general march of the verse is cumbrous and His lines do not vibrate like unmusical. polished lances, at once strong and light, in the hands of his persons, but are wielded like clumsy batons in a bloodless affray. Instead of the graceful familiarity and idiomatical melodies of Shakespeare, they are apt, too, to fall into clumsy prose, in their approaches to the easy and colloquial style; and, in the loftier passages, are occasionally deformed by low and common images, that harmonize but ill with the general solemnity of the diction.

A man gifted as he is, when he aspires at dramatic fame, should emulate the greatest of dramatists. Let Lord Byron then think of Shakespeare-and consider what a noble range of character, what a freedom from mannerism and egotism, there is in him! How much he seems to have studied nature; how little to have thought about himself; how seldom to have repeated or glanced back at his own most successful inventions! Why indeed should he? Nature was still open before him, and inexhaustible; and the freshness and variety that still delight his readers, Take his Hamlet, for instance. What must have had constant atractions for himself.