unincumbered with mind, it is still more so for rational beings. The proverb says truly, "That constant work makes a boy dull;" and it is the quality of dulness which is generated by toil unmitigated by rest and recreation; those faculties that ought to be sharpened to the utmost are blunted, and there is a partial death of the finer and more valuable powers: by injudiciously exacting too much, a race of intelligent servants may be converted into stupid slaves. It is not unlikely that the drama would be more successful if it were conducted more plainly, and in a less costly. style. The perfection of the machinery and scenery of the modern theatres seems to be unfavourable to the goodness of composition and acting; since the accessaries are so excellent, the opinion is encouraged, that the principals are less important, and may be neglected with impunity, The effect of good scenery at the first glance is, no doubt, very striking; but it soon passes away. If we saw a Garrick acting Shakspeare in a large hall, without any scenes, we should cease in a few minutes to be sensible of the want of them. We are almost disposed to believe, that exactly in proportion as scenery has been improved, good acting has declined.

The present age is too much inclined to make human life, in every department, resemble a great lottery, in which there are a very few enormous prizes, and all the rest of the tickets are blanks. The stage has not escaped the evil we complain of; on the contrary, it is a striking instance of the mischief of this unequal partition. The public are of opinion, that it is impossible to reward a small number of actors too highly, and to pay the remainder at too low a rate; to neglect the latter enough, or to be sufficiently attentive to the former. On our stage, therefore, the inferior parts, and indeed all but one or two, and especially in tragedies, where the inequality is more intolerable, and more inexcusable, are sustained in a very inadequate manner. In foreign theatres, on the contrary, and especially in France, the whole performance is more equal, and consequently more agreeable. There is perhaps less difference than is commonly supposed between the best performers and those in the next class. Whatever the difference be, it is an inconvenience aud an imperfection that ought to be palliated; but we aggravate it. The first-rate actor always does his best, because the audience expect it, and reward him with their applause; but no one cares for, or observes, the performer of second-rate talents. Whether he be perfect in his part, and exert himself to the utmost, or be slovenly or negligent throughout, he is unpraised and unblamed. The general effect, therefore, of our tragedies, is very unsatisfactory; for that is far greater, where all the characters are tolerably well supported, than where there is one good actor, and all the other parts are inhumanly murdered. This latter is too often the case on our stage; for with us art does little, nothing being taught systematically! The French players, on the contrary, are thoroughly drilled, and well instructed in every requisite.*

In Vol. xlvi.p. 368, there is an Essay on the History of Private Theatricals, containing a vast deal of rare and curious knowledge on a subject which has not been discussed by any other writer in so attractive a manner. It has been ascribed, though I know not on what grounds, to Lady Morgan. I could not find room for it without displacing other articles of equal interest. For the same reason, the following have been rejected: a Critique on the Anglo-French Drama, Vol. li. p. 225; and a Disquisition on Greek Tragedy, Vol. xlvii. p. 418.

SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE DURING THE REIGNS OF ELIZABETH AND JAMES.*

All true lovers of English poetry have been long in love with the dramatists of the time of Elizabeth and James; and must have been sensibly comforted by their late restoration to some degree of favour and notoriety. If there was any good reason indeed to believe, that the notice which they have recently attracted proceeded from any thing but that indiscriminate rage for editing and annotating by which the present times are so happily distinguished, we should be disposed to hail it as the most unequivocal symptom of improvement in public taste that has yet occurred to reward and animate our labours. At all events, however, it gives us a chance of such an improvement, by placing in the hands of many, who would not otherwise have heard of them, some of those beautiful performances which we have always regarded as among the most pleasing and characteristic productions of our genius.

We cannot resist the opportunity which this publication seems to afford, of saying a word or two of a class of writers, whom we have long worshipped in secret with a sort of idolatrous veneration, and now find once more brought forward as candidates for public applause. The era to which they belong, indeed, has always appeared to us by far the brightest in the history of English literature,-or indeed of human intellect and capacity. There never was, any where, any thing like the sixty or seventy years that elapsed from the middle of Elizabeth's reign to the period of the Restoration. In point of real force and originality of genius, neither the age of Pericles, nor the age of Augustus, nor the times of Leo X., nor of Louis XIV., can come at all into comparison; for, in that short period, we shall find the names of almost all the very great men that this nation has ever produced, -the names of Shakspeare, and Bacon, and Spenser, and Sidney,-and Hooker, and Taylor, and Barrow, and Raleigh,—and Napier, and Milton, and Cudwort, and Hobbes, and many others;-men, all of them, not merely of great talents and accomplishments, but of vast compass and reach of understanding, and of minds truly creative and original;-not perfecting art by the delicacy of their taste, or digesting knowledge by the justness of their reasonings; but making vast and substantial additions to the materials upon which taste and reason must hereafter be employed, and enlarging, to an incredible and unparalleled extent, both the stores and the resources of the human faculties.

Whether the brisk concussion which was given to men's minds by the force of the Reformation, had much effect in producing this sudden developement of British genius, we cannnot undertake to determine. For our own part, we should be rather inclined to hold, that the Reformation itself was but one symptom or effect of that great spirit of progression and improvement which had been set in operation by deeper and more general causes, and which afterwards blossomed out into this splendid harvest of authorship. But whatever may have been the causes that determined the appearance of these great works, not only that they appeared together in great numbers, but that they possessed a common character, which, in spite of the great diversity of their subjects and designs, would have made them be classed together as the works of the same order or description of men,

*The Dramatic Works of John Ford; with an Introduction and Explanatory Notes. By Henry Weber, Esq.-Vol. xviii. p. 275. August, 1811.

even if they had appeared at the most distant intervals of time. They are the works of Giants-and of Giants of one nation and family; and their characteristics are, great force, boldness, and originality, together with a certain raciness of English peculiarity, which distinguishes them from all those performances that have since been produced upon a more vague and general idea of European excellence. Their sudden appearance, indeed, in all this splendour of native luxuriance, can only be compared to what happens on the breaking up of a virgin soil,—where all indigenous plants spring up at once with a rank and irrepressible fertility, and display whatever is peculiar or excellent in their nature, on a scale the most conspicuous and magnificent. The crops are not indeed so clean as where a more exhausted mould has been stimulated by systematic cultivation, nor so profitable as where their quality has been varied by a judicious admixture of exotics, and accommodated to the demands of the universe, by the combinations of an unlimited trade. But to those whose chief object of admiration is the living power and energy of vegetation, and who take delight in contemE plating the various forms of her unforced and natural perfection, no spectacle can be more rich, splendid, or attractive.

In the times of which we are speaking, classical learning, though it had made great progress, had by no means become an exclusive study; and the ancients had not yet been permitted to subdue men's minds to a sense of hopeless inferiority, or to condemn the moderns to the lot of humble imitators. They were resorted to, rather to furnish materials and occasional ornaments, than as models for the general style of composition; and, while they enriched the imagination, and insensibly improved the taste of their successors, they did not at all restrain their freedom, or impair their originality. No common standard had yet been erected, to which all the works of European genius were required to conform; and no general authority was acknowledged, by which all private or local ideas of excellence must submit to be corrected. Both readers and authors were comparatively few in number. The former were infinitely less critical than they have since become; and the latter, if they were not less solicitous about fame, were at least much less jealous and timid as to the hazards which attended its pursuit. Men, indeed, seldom took to writing in those days, unless they had a great deal of matter to communicate; and neither imagined that they could make a reputation by delivering commonplaces in an elegant manner, or that the substantial value of their sentiments would be disregarded for a little rudeness or negligence in the finishing. They were habituated, therefore, both to depend upon their own resources, and to draw upon them without fear or anxiety; and followed the dictates of their own taste and judgment, without standing in awe of the ancients, of their readers, or of each other. The achievements of Bacon, and of those who set free our understandings from the shackles of papal and of tyrannical imposition, afford sufficient evidence of the benefit which resulted to the reasoning faculties from this happy independence of the first great writers of this nation. But its advantages were, if possible, still more conspicuous in the mere literary character of their productions. The quantity of bright thoughts, of original images, and splendid expressions, which they poured forth upon every occasion, and by which they illuminated and adorned the darkest and most rugged topics to which they had happened to turn themselves, is such as has never been equalled in any other age or country; and places them at least as high, in point of fancy and imagination, as of force of reason, or

comprehensiveness of understanding. In this highest and most comprehensive sense of the word, a great proportion of the writers we have alluded to were Poets: and, without going to those who composed in metre, and chiefly for purposes of delight, we will venture to assert, that there is in any one of the prose folios of Jeremy Taylor more fine fancy and original imagery-more brilliant conceptions and glowing expressions -more new figures, and new applications of old figures-more, in short, of the body and the soul of poetry, than in all the odes and the epics that have since been produced in Europe. There are large portions of Barrow, and of Hooker, and Bacon, of which we may say nearly as much: nor can any one have a tolerably adequate idea of the riches of our language and our native genius, who has not made himself acquainted with the prose writers, as well as the poets, of this memorable period.

The civil wars, and the fanaticism by which they were fostered, checked all this fine bloom of the imagination, and gave a different and less attractive character to the energies which they could not extinguish. Yet these were the times that matured and drew forth the dark but powerful genius of such men as Cromwell, and Harrison, and Fleetwood, etc.the milder and more generous enthusiasm of Blake, and Hutchison, and Hampden-and the stirring and indefatigable spirit of Pym, and Hollis, and Vane-and the chivalrous and accomplished loyalty of Strafford and Falkland, at the same time that they stimulated and repaid the severer studies of Coke, and Selden, and Milton. The drama, however, was entirely destroyed, and has never since regained its honours; and poetry, in general, lost its ease, and its majesty and force, along with its copiousness and originality.

The Restoration made things still worse; for it broke drown the barriers of our literary independence, and reduced us to a province of the great republic of Europe. The genius and fancy which lingered through the usurpation, though soured and blighted by the severities of that inclement season, were still genuine English genius and fancy, and owned no allegiance to any foreign authorities. But the Restoration brought in a French taste upon us, and what was called classical and a polite taste; and the wings of our English Muses were clipped and trimmed, and their flights regulated, at the expense of all that was peculiar, and much of what was brightest in their beauty. The king and his courtiers, during their long exile, had of course imbibed the taste of their protectors; and, coming from the gay court of France, with something of that additional profligacy that belonged to their outcast and adventurer character, were likely enough to be revolted by the peculiarities, and by the very excellencies, of our native literature. The grand and sublime tone of our greater poets appeared to them dull, morose, and gloomy; and the fine play of their rich and unrestrained fancy, mere childishness and folly; while their frequent lapses and perpetual irregularity were set down as clear indications of barbarity and ignorance. Such sentiments, too, were natural, we must admit, for a few dissipated and witty men, accustomed all their days to the regulated splendour of a court-to the gay and heartless gallantry of French manners-and to the imposing pomp and brilliant regularity of French poetry. But it may appear somewhat more unaccountable, that they should have been able to impose their sentiments upon the great body of the nation. A court, indeed, never has O much influence as at the moment of a restoration but the influence of

en English court has been but rarely discernible in the literature of the country; and had it not been for the peculiar circumstances in which the nation was then placed, we believe it would have resisted this attempt to naturalise foreign notions, as sturdily as it has done on almost every other occasion.

At this particular moment, however, the native literature of the country had been sunk into a very low and feeble state by the rigours of the usurpation; the best of its recent models laboured under the reproach of republicanism; and the courtiers were not only disposed to see all its peculiarities with an eye of scorn and aversion, but had even a good deal to say in favour of that very opposite style to which they had been habituated. It was a witty, and a grand, and splendid style. It showed more scholarship and art, than the luxuriant negligence of the old English school; and was not only free from many of its hazards and some of its faults, but possessed merits of its own, of a character more likely to please those who had then the power of conferring celebrity, or condemning to derision. Then it was a style which it was peculiarly easy to justify by argument; and in support of which, great authorities, as well as imposing reasons, were always ready to be produced. It came upon us with the air and the pretension of being the style of cultivated Europe, and a true copy of the style of polished antiquity. England, on the other hand, had had but little intercourse with the rest of the world for a considerable period of time; her language was not at all studied on the Continent; and her native authors had not been taken into account in forming those ideal standards of excellence which had been recently constructed in France and Italy, upon the authority of the Roman classics and of their own most celebrated writers. When the comparison came to be made, therefore, it is easy to imagine that it should generally be thought to be very much to our disadvantage, and to understand how the great multitude, even among ourselves, should be dazzled with the pretensions of the fashionable style of writing, and actually feel ashamed of their own richer and more varied productions.

It would greatly exceed our limits to describe accurately the particulars in which this new continental style differed from our old insular one: but, for our present purpose, it may be enough perhaps to say, that it was more worldly, and more townish,-holding more of reason, and ridicule, and authority-more elaborate and more assuming-addressed more to the judgment than to the feelings, and somewhat ostentatiously accommodated to the habits, or supposed habits, of persons in fashionable life. Instead of tenderness and fancy, we had satire and sophistry-artificial declamation, in place of the spontaneous animations of genius-and for the universal language of Shakspeare, the personalities, the party politics, and the brutal obscenities of Dryden. Nothing, indeed, can better characterise the change which had taken place in our national taste, than the alterations and additions which this eminent person presumed and thought it necessary -to make on the productions of Shakspeare and Milton. The heaviness, the coarseness, and the bombast of that abominable travestie, in which he has exhibited the Paradise Lost in the form of an opera, and the atrocious indelicacy and compassionable stupidity of the new characters with which he has polluted the enchanted solitude of Miranda and Prospero in the Tempest, are such instances of degeneracy as we would be apt to impute rather to some transient hallucination in the author himself, than to the