has taught the French poet how to render the character of Clytemnestra infinitely more interesting in his tragedy of Oreste. Mortimer brought forth by his keepers, in Henry the Fourth, with some hints from another English play, has given rise to the pathetic scene of Lusignan recovering his children; nor could he ever have written his favourite play of Zaire, had he never read Othello. He has there ventured to make a lover stab his mistress and afterwards himself upon the stage, and has even ventured in his Semiramis to introduce a ghost, who was very well received, though no ghost ever rose to so little purpose, for he gives no information, and contributes in no degree to the catastrophe. The effect of the apparition is weakened too by its taking place, not in silence and in solitude, as where the shade of the murdered king tells the sad story to his son in Shakspeare, but before great numbers, and in a very public place. There is no sentiment perhaps, no turn of passion, no pathetic situation, which may not have been as well described and expressed in some English as in any French poet; but if a tragedy is to be considered as a production worthy in every sense of being presented to a refined, intelligent audience, the comparison is, I think, very much in favour of the latter nation.

There is more equality perhaps in the comic productions of these great rivals in arts as well as arms. English comedy is, indeed, too often coarse and licentious, and when not deserving those epithets, is yet to be blamed for pictures of human life which convey no good lesson, and for allusions to circumstances which should not be called into view. It is, however, very frequently, a just representation of human nature; while that of the French, in very superior language, with more attention to inculcate decency, and with drollery and wit, gives but an inaccurate view of society, and such, indeed as I believe never existed. Nothing can be more perfect than the delineation is, upon the French stage, of a single character-a miser, a jealous man, a coxcomb, a coquette, or a clown; but their adherence to the unities of time and place renders it unavoidable that individuals should be brought together in a way in which it is impossible they ever could have lived; and the received opinion, that love is a necessary ingredient in every play, introduces a sort of courtship very like seduction, and altogether foreign to French manners. With respect to the unity of place, I cannot conceive why, if we so far get the better of our conviction, as to suppose, for an hour or two, that the actors and actresses are gentlemen and ladies, or heroes and princesses of other countries and of other days, and that the time employed in the representation is equal to four and twenty hours, why we may not, I say, go a step further, and suppose that the personages before us have

time enough to go from one house, or even from one town to another. The Chinese, who are a very wise people, get over the difficulty very ingeniously. The character whom we are soon to figure to ourselves as in a very distant place, gives notice to the audience that he is going a journey, and very gravely getting astride his bamboo, and smacking his whip, he performs it in their presence, by galloping two or three times round the stage, and then gives notice of his arrival. With all the merit of French tragedy, there is sometimes, when the scene is laid in distant times and distant countries, an approximation to mo dern manners and to French customs which is absurd; and as in their comedy there is always too much stress laid upon the omnipotence of love, Voltaire has ventured, in one or two instances, to write a tragedy in which no part of the distress arises from this universal cause; but he has, on all other occasions, yielded to the general opinion, as Corneille, Racine, and Crebillon had done before him; an opinion which is certainly productive of very great inconsistencies. I can easily conceive that Mithridates, though far in the decline of life, and broken by misfortunes, had still enough of love in his disposition to be jealous of his wives, and we know from Plutarch what barbarous orders he gave respecting them; but I cannot bring myself to admit, that this great king could, in the midst of his magnanimous designs against the Romans, and when their legions were within a day's march of his capital, have been occupied about a Grecian beauty, and practising a trick, like Mr. Lovegold, to find out whether she loved his son or not. Nor can I bear that Sertorius, at the age of sixty, and whom I know to have had but one eye, or Philoctetes, after twenty years of retreat, and in all the anguish of an incurable wound, should be making declarations of love; that Cæsar should make so insipid a speech as to say, that he had fought at Pharsalia for the bright eyes of Cleopatra, or that the gloomy inexorable Electra should mingle her groans of vengeance against the murderer of her father with sighs for the charms and graces of the murderer's son.

I have already mentioned to you the most distinguished writers of tragedy in the French language. Those of comedy are more numerous; and I am sorry that you cannot judge for yourself of the truth and decency of Destouches, the gayety of Regnard, the wit of Lesage, the originality of Dufresny, the lively natural dialogue of Dancourt, and the affecting representations of La Chaussée. This last is considered in France as the inventor of a species of dramatic composition very common in the English language, but unknown before his time to the French; a composition the scenes of which are taken from common life, and which, without being as gay as comedy, or as distressing as tragedy, may be said to partake of the nature of both. In enume

rating the writers of French comedy I have said nothing of Moliere, whom the consent of mankind has placed at the head of the class he belongs to. His characters are those of human nature itself; but the manner of his pieces is sometimes coarse, and the denoument is frequently improbable, and very hastily made up. Of plot, indeed, there is very little in the best French comedies. Their writers were soon sensible of the absurdity of those surprising turns of fortune, those mistakes by masks and disguises, so common in the Spanish plays, which drew off the attention of the audience from the consideration of cha racter and language, and describe a man as deceived rather by his senses than by his passions and affections. Perhaps, however, they have mistaken the reverse of wrong for right, and they may have wanted that wholesome lesson which an author in England is always exposed to receive from the more noisy and powerful part of the audi̟ence, who insist upon being amused in the way they best understand, as they do upon the habeas corpus act and the trial by jury. Their attention must be kept up by the intricacy of plot, and they must have jokes and allusions suited to their ordinary conversation and their pursuits in life. In France it was far otherwise. The dramatic author considered himself as writing for the more enlightened part of the community, and knew no more of the people as a body having certain rights than he did of the habeas corpus act, or than the government did. The public taste, however, in France, whether degenerated or not, or whether affected by the growing fermentation which preceded the revolution, seemed returning to a fondness for the ancient drama, when that great event took place, which gave a new turn to theatrical entertainments as well as to every thing else. The principal promoter of this return to the model of the Spanish drama was Beaumarchais, a man so singular, and so remarkable in various capacities, that I may well devote a few lines to him. Born in obscurity and almost in poverty, and after having exercised with a sort of distinction the trade he was apprenticed to, he very rapidly attracted the attention, and secured to himself the protection of some of the most eminent personages in the kingdom. Rendering himself useful where he had been admitted for his pleasurable talents, and as much admired for his wit and and knowledge, as for the graces of his person and the charms of his conversation on the most trifling subjects, he became immensely rich without ever having filled a lucrative employment, or pursued any object, to appearance, but his pleasure. The fact was, however, that under all the appearance of dissipation, and with the exterior habits of an idle man, he could calculate in his closet, with more than common precision, and could form the most complicated and extensive schemes of commercial speculations. Prosecutions which would forever have

blackened the name of any other person (for there are offences of which an honest man ought not to be for a moment suspected) were to him sources of celebrity and reputation; and the pleadings which he composed in his own defence are as much read by men of taste among the French, as the letters of Junius are in England and America. His comedies, with much less regard to morality than the decency of the French stage admits, are as intricate, and as full of plot and counterplot as the old English or Spanish plays, and much too long. They were, nevertheless, extremely successful at the time, and are still acted to full houses. It would have been singular that such a man, so noted, and, above all, so rich, should have escaped the cruelty and rapacity of Robespierre, and the fact is, he was imprisoned at the Abbaye, with a number of others, who were devoted to destruction in Septemtember 1793. On the evening, however, before the fatal day, which will always be still more disgraceful to Paris than the St. Barthelemi, he was privately liberated through the influence of Le Gendre, the butcher whom he had personally offended, by that very Le Gendre whose motion in the national assembly, against the person of the king, was so singularly cruel and atrocious. The fear of not being thought hearty in the cause, and the vanity of going beyond others, were, perhaps, the sources of half the atrocities of the revolution. One consequence of the revolutionary government was to diminish the morality of the stage, and to permit, that not only the distinctions of society, but all which the consent of past ages had deemed most venerable, should be held out to public ridicule, while the laws of the drama were treated with as little respect. But the return to former ideas in all matters of taste, and the well-regulated police of the present day, are perceivable at the theatre also, which is rapidly reassuming its ancient habits. Some relaxation, however is still observable, and some liberties are allowed to be taken with those religious establishments which were once deemed so sacred. The Visitandines, for instance, in which a young man gets admittance into a convent under the disguise of a nun, followed by a wicked dog of a valet de chambre, who is dressed as a friar, is still a favourite piece, and some allowance ought to be made, perhaps, for a composition which, though improper, is not, strictly speaking, immoral, accompanied as it is, with so much humour, and such good music. There are others, of the smaller pieces, which are extremely well imagined. In one of them, a young physician, who is represented as on service in Germany, mistakes one town for another, and going to an Austrian post, gives orders to prepare for the general hospital of the French army, with so much confidence, that the commandant is glad to hurry out of it and leave him in possession. This gives rise, as you may suppose, to a great deal of flattery, which is la

vished upon the emperor and upon his invincible army. Every man in the parterre sits erect upon the occasion, as if he also was a hero, and the piece, which has no great merit in itself, is received with a thunder of applause. In another, two young people of high rank, who had lived miserably together as man and wife, find themselves shut up in a place where the noise of keys and a parade of guards, consisting of servants dressed for the purpose, and the ferocious countenance of the one who passes for the turnkey, are all calculated to make them mistake the antiquated but peaceful mansion of a country gentleman, for a state prison. Their mutual friends it seems had joined in the experiment, and the young people suppose themselves immured in consequence of their complaints against each other, a circumstance which adds not a little to the bitterness of their first conversation in the common room. They soon discover, however, and with a sort of regret, after the first torrent of reproach and recrimination, that they are to be together but for a limited time, and are to be confined, during the remainder of the day, in separate apartments. Their behaviour now changes very rapidly. They soon find means to correspond. They corrupt the guards, who have been directed, as you may suppose, not to be inexorable, and, after a stolen interview, in which vows of eternal love and friendship are mutually made, they are on the point of escaping through a window, at the hazard of their lives, when the master of the house, or the governor of the castle, as they had supposed him, interferes and reveals the truth.* There is a sort of impropriety in some of their late pieces which was never before permitted, and which, though not liable to the censure of immorality, ought certainly to be discouraged. Characters of the last, and even of the present age, and who yet live in the memory of a great part of the audience, are converted into personages of the drama. Voltaire, Rousseau, Richlieu, the great king of Prussia, and even the much-lamented Malesherbes, are brought before the public, and the actors are made to look, to speak, and to dress as like as possible to the persons whose names they assume. Nothing perhaps, can more strongly express how little sensibility there is in a French audience, than its being suffered that M. de Malesherbes, whom every one affects to lament, should be brought forth in this manner, to amuse the populace by singing, by sallies of wit, and by a certain eccentricity of character which

• Nothing, perhaps, could give a better idea of the difference between the French and English stage than the manner in which this little piece of Claire and Adolphe has been adapted to the latter. The turnkey, who is represented as an Irishman, amuses the audience by singing one of his native songs, and by a number of bulls, and makes love to the lady's maid in rather a free manner In other respects it is well translated.