is very remarkable, and pregnant with instruction as to the limits of the drama, and the causes of the decline of its popularity, so painfully conspicuous in the British empire. No one complains of weariness at a trial for murder; on the contrary, all classes, and especially the lowest, will sit at such, to them, heart-stirring scenes, without feeling fatigue, for ten, twelve, sometimes eighteen hours consecutively. Nor can it be affirmed that this is because the interest is real; that the life of a human being is at stake. Every day's experience proves that fiction, when properly managed, is more interesting than reality. The vast multitude of novels which yearly issue from the press, the eagerness with which they are sought after by all classes, the extraordinary extent of their circulation, sufficiently proves this. No one complains that the best romances of Sir Walter Scott or Bulwer are too long; on the contrary, they are generally felt to be too short; and those who are loudest in their declamations against the intolerable fatigue of the theatre, will sit for days together with their feet at the fire, devouring indifferent novels.

The general complaint now made in Great Britain against the tedium of theatrical representations, was unknown in other ages and countries. The passion of the Greeks for their national theatre is well known, and the matchless perfection of their great dramatists proves to what a degree it is capable of rousing the human mind. It was a subject of complaint against Eschylus, that he threw many of his audience into convulsions, by the terrible power of his lyric poetry. The French, prior to the Revolution, were passionately fond of the drama, which was then entirely founded on the Greek model. The decline complained of in the Parisian theatre has been contemporary with the introduction of the Romantic school. In Italy, it is, with the opera, the chief, almost the sole public amusement. There is not a city with forty thousand inhabitants in the classic peninsula that has not a theatre and opera, superior to anything to be met with in the British islands out of London. The theatre is in high favour in Germany and Russia. Complaints, indeed, are frequently made, that the drama is declining on the Continent; and the present state of the lesser Parisian theatres certainly affords no indication that,

VOL. III.

H

in departing from the old landmarks and bringing romance on the stage, they have either preserved its purity or extended its influence. But the decline of the theatre is far greater and more remarkable in England than in any of the Continental states. It has indeed gone so far as to induce a serious apprehension among many well-informed persons that it will cease to exist, and the country of Shakspeare and Garrick, of Kemble and Siddons, be left altogether without a theatre at which the legitimate drama is represented. Such a result in a country overflowing, in the great cities and metropolis at least, with riches, and passionately desirous of every species of enjoyment, is very remarkable, and deserving of the most serious consideration. It may well make us pause in our career, and consider whether the course we have been pursuing has, or has not, been likely to lead to perfection and success in this noble and important branch of composition.

We have stated what are the limits of the drama, and what part is assigned to it in the general effort of the human mind to portray events, or paint the human heart. Macaulay has explained, in the passage already quoted, what the Romantic drama proposes to do, and the reason why, in his estimation, it is more likely to attain its end than the more limited action of the theatre of the Greeks. The whole question comes to be, which of the two systems is best adapted to attain the undoubted end of all dramatic composition, the painting of the human heart in its most moving and interesting situations? If he is right in the views he has so well expressed, it is very singular how it has happened, that in a country which, for the last three centuries, has constantly adhered to these ideas, and worked out the Romantic drama with extraordinary zeal and vigour, dramatic representations should have been constantly declining, so as at length to be threatened with total extinction. This becomes the more remarkable when it is recollected, that in other countries, inferior in wealth, genius, and energy to Great Britain, but where the old system has been adhered to, it is still flourishing in undiminished vigour, and that decay in them has uniformly been co-existent with the entry on the stage of Romantic representation. Racine, Corneille, Voltaire in France, and Metastasio and Alfieri in Italy; Schiller and

Goethe in Germany, have nobly upheld the legitimate drama in their respective countries. Still more extraordinary is it, if these views be the correct ones, that while, by the marvels of one heaven-born genius, the Romantic drama was in the days of Queen Elizabeth raised to the very highest perfection in this country, it has since continually languished, and cannot from his day number one name destined for immortality among its votaries.

It is said in answer to this obvious objection to the Romantic drama, founded on its fate in all the countries where it has been established, that it shares in this respect only in the common destiny of mankind in creating works of imagination; that the period of great and original conception is the first only-that Homer was succeeded by Virgil, Eschylus by Euripides, Dante by Tasso, Shakspeare by Pope, and that the age of genius in all countries is followed by that of criticism.* There can be no doubt that this observation is, in many respects, well founded; but it affords no solution of the causes of the present degraded condition of our national drama, nor does it explain the course it has taken in this country. We have made a progress, but it has not been from originality to taste, but from genius to folly. The age of Æschylus has not with us been succeeded by that of Sophocles and Euripides, but by that of Nero and the amphitheatre. We have not advanced from the wildness of conception to the graces of criticism, but from the rudeness of some barbaric imagination to the cravings of corrupted fancy. The age of Garrick has been with us succeeded, not by that of Roscius, but by that of Cerito; the melodrama of the opera, the dancing of Carlotta Grisi, have banished tragedy from the boards trod by Kemble and Siddons. The modern dramas which have been published, and in part appeared on the stage, have in no respect been distinguished by more correct taste, or a stricter adherence to rule, than those of Ford and Massinger, of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Jonson and Shakspeare. They have discarded, indeed, the indecency which forms so serious a blot on our older dramatists, but, in other respects, they have faithfully followed out their principles. The drama still, as in earlier days, professes to exhibit in a few hours a

* MACAULAY'S Essays. Article, Dryden.

representation of the principal events of a lifetime. Time and place are set at naught, as they were by the bard of Avon, and not unfrequently the last act opens at the distance of years, or hundreds of miles from the first. We need only mention the ablest and most popular of our modern dramas The Lady of Lyons, by Bulwer, and the best of his theatrical pieces, by Sheridan Knowles, for a confirmation of these observations. But no one will pretend that the dramatic works of these writers, able in many respects as they are, can be set off against the masterpieces of the Greek or French drama which succeeded the days of Eschylus and Corneille.

Again, it is said, and very commonly too, as an explanation of the extraordinary failure of striking dramatic genius since the days of Queen Elizabeth in this country, that originality and greatness can be reached only once in the lifetime of a nation; that we have had our Shakspeare as Greece had its Homer, and that we should be content; and that it is the necessary effect of superlative excellence in the outset, to extinguish rivalry and induce mediocrity in the end. The observation is plausible; and it has been so frequently made, that it has passed with many into a sort of axiom. But when tried by the only test of truth in human affairs that of experience--it entirely fails. Past history affords no countenance to the idea, that early greatness extinguishes subsequent emulation, or that superlative genius in one department is fatal to subsequent perfection in it. On the contrary, it creates it. It is by the collision of one great mind with another, that the greatest achievements of the human mind have been achieved: often the chain continues from one age and nation to another; but it is never snapped asunder. Homer did not extinguish Virgil; on the contrary, he created him. The admiration of Sophocles for Eschylus gave birth to the Edipus Tyrannus; Euripides wept with generous hopelessness of imitation, when he heard the tragedies of Sophocles recited at the Isthmian games. The greatness of Livy did not paralyse the hand of Tacitus; nor the eloquence of Demosthenes extinguish the voice of Æschines. Dante worshipped Virgil with an idolatrous affection; but the greatness of the master did not destroy the pupil. The originality and power of the Inferno neither

checked the exuberant flow of Ariosto's imagination, nor the generous glow of Tasso's feelings. The bold conceptions of Michael Angelo warmed into life the exquisite genius of Raphael the paintings of the Caracci made the youthful Correggio say " I, too, am a painter." Has poetry declined in Great Britain since it was brought to its greatest perfection by Milton; or tragedy in France since the great Corneille trod the stage with so noble a step? Let Pope and Dryden, Thomson and Gray, Burns and Scott, Byron and Wordsworth, Racine, Molière, and Voltaire, give the answer. Did Hume extinguish Gibbon; or Addison, Johnson; or the eloquence of Chatham prove fatal to the emulation of Pitt? Look around you, and it will universally be found that it is the collision of genius with genius which produces excellence; that the sacred fire transmitted is never lost. But Shakspeare has had no successor in this or any other country: he stands alone in unapproached grandeur.

Great efforts have been made in the most influential quarters in recent times to revive a taste for the old English dramatists in this country, but they met with no lasting success. Mr Fox was an extravagant admirer of Dryden, and so strongly did the feeling take root in his family, that not even the most favoured habitué of Holland House ventured to dissent from the opinion. Serjeant Talfourd, it is said, was once nearly shipwrecked there, by venturing to express some doubt on the subject. The merits of Ion were as nothing compared to such unpardonable heresy. The Whigs all embraced the same views; the Edinburgh Review for a long course of years sounded the praise of the old English drama; Ford and Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, were perpetually the theme of their eulogium. Sir Walter Scott was so carried away by the stream, that he persuaded the Ballantynes thirty years ago to publish a handsome edition of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, and the Whigs were to a great extent concussed into buying it. For a few years the richness, pathos, raciness, and depth of the old English dramatists were in all their mouths, and Ballantyne's edition in not a few of their libraries. But all would not do. The edition remained heavy stock. Lockhart's Life