the powers which are developed in us, has not been, in some measure, extended. How much more then have the faculties which wait upon observation, comparison and reflection, been enlarged? and what resources, unknown before, must not the only art which represents the human being in a state of successive action, thought and passion, have found, in the more complete development of his moral endowments, and their endless combinations! Besides this, many other arts, now employed as auxiliaries to the theatre, were not familiar; and representations on the Athenian stage, if we could behold them as they were in the ninety-third Olympiad, would necessarily appear to modern eyes —perhaps to the French themselves—inferior in attractions to the generality of European performances. If this be not admitted, we must either deny the general progress of the species; or assert that, by some inexplicable caprice, the stage alone, and its productions, have been excepted from the common law of improve ment. Without stopping to consider the mechanical part of dramatic representation, in which so many things have combined to give all moderns, who choose to take advantage of them, a decided superiority, we shall attach ourselves to the poem only; and endeavour to prove that an adherence to the practices of the Greek dramatic writers must be nearly as prejudicial to the progress of the stage, as too servile an attachment to the methods of Euclid would have been, to the more efficient modes of analysis, adopted by modern geometricians. The Greeks had, if we may so say, no positive antiquity, and but a limited ancestry. They had no traditions which could be relied upon, and no history but fable. No recollections furnished them with pictures of real men, bound together, or separated, by such various interests and passions as now prevail; and they could learn the mysteries of the heart from no records, and in no school, but the observation of the moment. Their great object was public life; for they had not yet so far subsided from political cares, as to allow to privacy such a share in their mind as it now possesses. Gods and heroes occupied their entire attention. Thus then their world was circumscribed to a narrower time and space; and from it was banished much of what now forms the charm of life; domestic relations, domestic joys and sorrows; the sympathies of ordinary men, and the feelings which nature inspires directly, in the first and nearest connections which she establishes among her creatures. The mythology of the Greeks has been called imaginative. It is perhaps rather imitative. It certainly belongs less to imagination than to imitation, to compose a pantheon out of all the frailties frailties collected from weak humanity; than to imagine one great omnipotent Being, with attributes all his own, and all infinite. Divinities whom man has created are not proper objects for the drama; for, while they are divinities, they are above our sympathy, and when they cease to be so they fall below our respect. For a similar reason, they are not proper agents for unravelling catastrophes; they are either too great, or too little, to interfere in the unequal conflict of mortal interests and passions. But the Greeks, ill versed in human nature on its widest scale, cut the knot which they could not solve: and gave up to their gods, who were little more than a privileged aristocracy of vice and weakness, the solution of every dramatic difficulty. But these and other disadvantages were inseparable from the situations of early men. They were the necessary results of the infancy of the world; of the narrowness of its civilized portion; and of the absence of many feelings and sympathies, which have been expanded as generations spread over wider regions. The Athenians had the excuse of necessity, for labouring under imperfections which they could not avoid; but, so far from considering them as masters, and taking them as models in the dramatic art, modern nations, while paying them every tribute of respect and admiration, should endeavour to enlarge its sphere; and, by generalising its principles, to raise it to the level which all modern knowledge, compared with ancient, has attained. It is not to be understood that the Greeks acted in contradiction to nature. Quite the reverse. They followed all that they knew concerning her; and it was she who was circumscribed. But a nation that, at this day, should do as the Greeks did, and admit nothing into its theatre which was not to be found in Sophocles or Euripides, would indeed be acting contrary to nature, and cutting away the most admirable portion of her works-that of which the most advanced civilization and intellect appreciate the value. Now this is very nearly what the French have done, during their whole dramatic career. They have looked back to the infancy of the art, and held it to be maturity. They have raised fictitious limits to a boundless space; and all beyond those limits they hardly consider as of this world. What was indispensable in the ancient dramatists, the French have adopted voluntarily; and, with the blindest servility, rejecting even the analogies of their situation, copied the strictest letter of the imperfections which the Greeks could not avoid. The Greeks took the subjects of their tragedies entirely from their own records and traditions. Even with a foreign title, the story of the Persæ of Eschylus was Grecian. The family of the Atrida was an inexhaustible exhaustible fund; and the adventures of the demigods and heroes of Greece completed the store of dramatic subjects. But the French did not liberate themselves from the very first trammels they met with on their way; and never recollecting that Sophocles and Euripides took their subjects from Greece, because Greece was their native country, and the most improved of antiquity, they conceived that none but Grecian stories were fit for the stage; that none else were worthy of poetry; that nothing could be pleasing to moderns, except the fables of antiquity; that fatalism was necessary to explain the passions of men abandoned wholly to themselves, and that mythology must be the most interesting theme to Christians! They thus bound the art inseparably to its former defects; and mistaking its inability for its want of will, its imperfections for its rules, they left themselves no means to enlarge the sphere, within which they are content to set themselves down for ever. Nations in their infancy, like school-boys of the upper form, who have learned little of the world, and mingled little in the concerns of men, may indeed be dazzled with antiquity: but much of this admiration ceases as they become acquainted with a more advanced state of society. We have had former occasions. to mention the characteristics of French intellect; and to assert that invention, imagination, induction, upon a large scale, are not among the number. It is most particularly in poetry that the deficiency of these qualities, as well as their want of true and enlarged taste, is perceptible. There really is no other method by which their obstinacy, in adhering to antiquated forms and infant spirits in the drama, can be explained; and, though at the risk of exciting their indignant wonder, we must make the unqualified assertion, that a defect of originality, of genius, of creative power, has doomed them to be copyists; that a want of taste conceals from them the misfortune of being chained to imitation; and that a want of strong and mighty feeling has led them to bow before rules, in the name of Aristotle, of which Aristotle never dreamed; and which, had he and his countrymen possessed more experience in the art which represents the human world in action, they would have rejected with disdain. Dramatic representations took their origin in France, as in most other countries, from religious ceremonies. Mysteries and Moralities first occupied the stage there, as elsewhere; and in them the devil played the principal part, as he does at this moment in the autos sacramentales of the Spanish theatre. The tribe of poets who composed such Mysteries is almost as numerous as that which has flourished since Corneille. Among the first attempts at a regular theatre, were some translations from the the Greek, the most remarkable of which were the Electra of Sophocles, and the Hecuba of Euripides, by Baif, and Iphigenia in Aulis, by Subilet; but it does not appear that they were ever performed. Jodelle, born at Paris in 1532, who succeeded to these, took his subjects, not indeed from the Greeks, though still from antiquity; and introduced choruses into his Cleopatra and his Dido, all written in the most barbarous style, and interlarded with the puns and conceits which bad taste had selected from the muse of Italy. These plays, however, delighted all who saw them, and inspired Ronsard with the following laudatory strains, characteristic of the literature of the times : 'Jodelle, le premier, d'une plainte hardie, Et, si bien les sonna, que Sophocle et Ménandre, ་ The performers who at that time were in possession of the stage, les Confreres de la Passion, and les Clercs de la Rayoche, refused at first to perform Jodelle's tragedies; but, finding that they became favourites with the public, the former consented, and, under the title of Comédiens de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne, attracted crowded audiences; and thus Jodelle may be considered as the founder of the French stage. His example encouraged La Péruse, who translated the Medea of Seneca; St. Gelois, who translated the Sophonisba of Trissino; Grevin, who had a Mort de César acted at the college of Beauvais, and Jean de la Faille, who imitated some situations of the Troads in his Gabaomites, The style of all these was miserably bad. One says, L'amour mange mon sang, l'amour mon sang demande.' Another exclaims, "Votre enfer, dieu d'enfer, pour mon bien je desire! Sachant l'enfer d'amour, de tous enfers, le pire.' Garnier came after these, and wrote at least eight tragedies; seven of which were accompanied with choruses. They were very much admired, and passed through fifteen editions, the last of which was in 1618. His contemporaries prefer him to all his predecessors; and Ste. Marthe says he is inferior to none of the ancients. The following soliloquy of Cesar, returning victorious to Rome, will give an idea of his style : 'O sourcilleuses tours! ô coteaux decorés ! O palais orgueilleux! ô temples honorés! O vous! murs que les dieux ont maçonnés eux mêmes, Eux mêmes etoffés de mille diadêmes, Ne ressentez vous point le plaisir de vos cœurs, VOL. XXIX. NO. LVII. C Par ་ ་་་་ " སླ aparate et le Tigre? * monde et aux Romains; sien je sa „orene voisine tes Zereux iu maan iilumine, asse ve la course du jour Danger knows full well has but is more dangerous than he! mese promite or at the French dramatic writers, was Garner, ne one dying in 1390, the other in 1630. A WIN stant sex tumored dramatic pieces; but he is V Paying thate il nos personages speak the same lanam Nordicans, we quater winie we speak it—for violating As fed nece s Martine, which served as the Fiscord v. V grande, a say that counterpoised the sucAny Heruciens. Fifty-six plays (the poor tx downs were vented a 1028, in six volumes. MH và nh t là và thật thà e died in 1080. He was ALATYASUNG-RETHong the rival, lie eueury, and then again the Under ty khi ne author of twelve plays, the best of Nys visong "minod trom Trissino, and which remained cools the lenge even ater Corneille had appeared. It Aare Ouch when reds before the Cid, and is a good exmics of the times. Syphax, husband of Sopho leder winch she had written to Massinissa, Que as an ally of the Roman army, comSephoraba had become enamoured of him, a day saw him reconnoitring the ramparts, ... worve, with which her husband reproaches her, |