nion, which Dr. Johnson delivered as a eulogium, would have been the most derogatory that could have been devised to the merit of our great bard, had it been true: but fortunately for those who admire his plays, it is altogether unfounded; and in order to give it either sense or justice, it must be reversed. The prodigious excellence of Shakspeare, that which raises him above every other poet, is, that all his characters are individuals. They do, indeed, belong to some class, and so do all men; but, besides the generic attributes which mark that class, each has his own peculiar qualities, which distinguish him from every other individual appertaining to it. Macbeth and Richard belong to the class of ambitious men, who would undertake any thing to gratify their ruling passion; but it is impossible not to distinguish each from the other by his individual characteristics. Shylock and Iago belong to the vindictive class; Othello and Leontes to the jealous; yet nothing can be more different than the details of those passions in each personage. Individuals in real life neither do nor can represent classes; and it would be a strange imitation which would give to the copy properties which the original could not possess. It is juster praise to say, that in the writings of some poets, a character is too often a species, whereas in those of Shakspeare it is always an individual. It is this close, this condensed mode of representing mankind, which gives such truth and vividness to all his conceptions; which makes us believe in the deception he practises upon us, and completes the illusion. He is the only poet who has observed the progress of nature in constituting moral genera and species; and in proceeding from them by more determinate characteristics, to varieties, and thence by shades still more defined, to individuals. A single passion or propensity constitutes the generic property. The addition of a second diminishes the numbers of persons to whom it can apply, and makes the picture more precise. A third and a fourth bring it still closer to the likeness of a single original, till, at length, an assemblage of qualities too minute and too exact to meet together in any other person in the same proportion and degrees, reduce it to the strict likeness of one only living sentient being. Thus it is, that men in real life are characterized as individuals, as distinct from all the race; and thus only can poetic individuality be delineated. A single passion or propensity, insulated from all others, is a mere abstraction; and to make men act as genera or species would be an incorrect mode of representing them. One only passion never did exist in a human breast, even the most absorbed by mania; and whether in reality or fiction, it must be devoid of moral interest. The poetry which does but describe, may, indeed, occupy itself upon genera and species; because the entire world,

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world, with all its modes and beings, may be pictured by description; yet even descriptive poetry receives additional charms from the precision with which individual objects are painted. But the poetry which acts, cannot for a single instant act otherwise than men do. The drama, whose business it is to set before our eyes the scenes of real life, must give those scenes as they occur in real life; as the operations of individuals, not of classes. So fatal is the opposite conception, that it has been a principal cause of failure to one of the brightest geniuses of the present times; and the limited success of Miss Baillie's tragedies we speak not of her comedies-may in a great measure be attributed to the perseverance with which she disdained to extend the theme of her dramas. It is true that she could not remain strictly within the limits she had proposed to herself; but the attempt alone put shackles on her mind, and she voluntarily made herself inferior to what she otherwise was fully endowed to be. By individuality, we do not mean that the personages should be the copies of any existing individuals; but that their qualities should be so combined and concentrated as to be applicable but to one single ideal individual of the species.

If the principle upon which Dr. Johnson founded his eulogium of Shakspeare were correct, that dramatic personages which represent classes are preferable to those which represent individuals, the French stage would be the most perfect in the world. But the very defect of all French dramatists is, that, with vague and lax ideas upon the true principles of the art, they have attempted to express in their copies what never was known in the original, unless when the original itself was warped from the order of nature; and to show a single living, acting, thinking, sentient being, as if he were a thousand men, an abstract multiple of self. Even Molière had no just notions of character in this respect, but made his personages classes; and sometimes inscribed upon them epithets which could not properly belong to them. Alceste in The Misanthrope, is wholly misnamed. He is a morose sullen French humourist, as much out of vanity and dissatisfied self-love, as out of feeling; and never could have received such an appellation any where but in France, where every man, who, from whatever motive, does not skip along with the general rabble, is called a misanthrope. But how different is the Alceste of Molière, from the real misanthrope, the Timon of Shakspeare ! The Bourgeois Gentilhomme is a comedy founded entirely upon the peculiarities of two classes in society; and neither Mons. Jourdain nor Dorante possess any qualities which do not belong to the respective ranks. The former may be considered as the type of all French citizens, the

latter

The

latter of all French courtiers of their times: but they have no individual characteristics; and it is a misnomer to call the one Jourdain, the other Dorante. The list of the dramatis personæ might better have said, Un Bourgeois, Un homme de cour. Avare is the type of his species, Miser; but he is not sufficiently characterized by humours of his own to make him, if we may use the expression, concrete; and he remains an ideal picture of the passion of avarice. The Tartuffe is infinitely preferable to Harpagon in this respect. He has an ambitious covetousness of fortune, not so much out of the wish of merely hoarding riches, as from the desire of possessing and using them; and he employs his false devotions as a means of deceiving the wealthy master of a family. He is, moreover, amorously inclined, and would willingly accept of any bonne fortune that fate might throw in his way. Still, however, he never loses sight of the main object, but makes his love subservient to his grand design. In point of individuality, Tartuffe is the masterpiece of Molière, and of the French stage. Yet the sum total of passions and propensities, and humours, which Massinger has conferred upon his Sir Giles Overreach, without, however, producing either contradiction or confusion, for in this the perfection of the art consists-certainly offers a more vivid picture of individuality, than even this chef-d'œuvre. As to the comedies which represent a single whim or habit, as the Irrésolu, the Distrait, the Glorieux, &c. they are the very quintessence of the fault which has robbed Miss Baillie of her just tribute of fame; and beside their general want of action, interest, and relief of every kind, are completely dull and insipid, because they are pictures of abstractions, which their authors attempt to put in action. We are far from attributing this deficiency of Molière to his own intellect. He was fully adequate to paint what he saw, but he saw nothing but classes. His nation hardly contained an individual character; all was rubbed down to smoothness. Every feeling and passion, every propensity, that is not generic, was effaced; and all that was left him to copy were the lax and vague characteristics of ranks and classes, with the accidents which happen among them, not among individuals. All his lovers are alike; all his young ladies minutely resemble each other; all his valets have the same features of which Scapin is the caricature; all his Sganarelles are one and the same man, if any of them can be called one; and in them may be included his Georges Dandin; but he drew them all alike, because his originals had ceased to be individuals.

The comedy of humours is the comedy of individuals. It is the true living concrete picture of man and of society; and such

it is in this country. The entire theatre of France could not muster such a number of individual characters well defined as the single English comedy of Every Man in his Humour; and certainly other poets, beside Ben Jonson, might be named in Britain, who, in the delineation of character, are much superior to Molière. But they drew from a large provision of models, profusely spread before them; and out of those original materials, they combined many unexpected and amusing personages, such as, even if they never did exist, were very well within the limits of probability; and thus, by fancy, enlarged the domain of comedy beyond the tangible world.

It is in good sterling dramatic wit that Molière is the most pre-eminent. In France, no person has come near him in this quality; not even Racine in his Plaideurs, who delights by another species of vis comica, not indeed inferior to it. The Sganarelle of Molière's Cocu imaginaire, is a perfect model of that kind of wit in which a comic author may indulge, to place his personage in the most ludicrous light, without making him the butt of his own sarcasms. The wit in which Beaumarchais abounds is not of so chaste a character, for it is generally delivered as wit by those who utter it; and Figaro is a bel esprit by profession, as well as a poet, a farrier, a varlet, a barber, &c. The admirable scene in the Misanthrope-to which by the bye the author of the School for Scandal was not a little indebted even while he surpassed it is replete with the best kind of dramatic wit; and there does not exist a writer of any age or country who excels the French poet in this point, unless it be perhaps Sheridan. It must be remembered that Sheridan was the rival of Pitt, Burke, and Fox, in eloquence; and, in that quality, it was almost forgotten that he was the author of one of the best comedies in the English language.

The French author who, in drawing character, approached the nearest to Molière, was, perhaps, Lesage in his Turcaret, which, however, is composed of many reminiscences from his great master. Both indeed had the common defect of painting manners, not characters; and, consequently, of producing comedies of classes, not of individuals. But this is a defect which the French public would not even perceive; and we are not aware that any critics of that nation have made the remark. The comic writers who have excelled those of every other country in drawing characters are the English. The rich and fanciful Spanish theatre, though replete with more varied personages than the French, cannot yet vie with the British; and the German, which might be supposed to have had many resources, cannot be compared with our own. The long possession of political liberty-

or,

or, to speak more properly, the causes from which that liberty is derived has developed in Britain such a variety of character, has produced so diversified a public, and stamped on every member of it such powerful features, that comedy has the widest field from which to choose; and our critics, imbued with great ideas, have prescribed but one rule in the imitation of nature; the only rule indeed which she herself would prescribe,' do not violate nature.' But the rule of the French critics nurtured in the school of their nation seems to be, do not imitate nature; in the place of her greatness and her beauties, substitute art and artificial conventions; allow the soul no range, in order that it may be compassed in three hours; give passion no scope that it may always be polite; and bring all the actors of your drama into one spot, in order that the audience may suppose themselves really in the palace of Augustus, where persons, who never could have entered it, are conspiring against him; or in the chamber of Chimene, where the murderer of her father never, should have been.

There is not a single stage into which the observance of the French unities-for we will not call them Greek-has been introduced, that has not suffered by the introduction and lost its native boldness and energy by the alliance. To begin with our own theatre, we will remark, that during the period when French literature had no ascendancy among us, our poets had no standard but nature, and allowed their genius to be cramped by no rules. The result was the most vigorous delineation that ever was attempted by any nation, and the truest picture of life that it ever entered into the conception of the drama to undertake. In the completion of these noble and comprehensive ends are sunk many trifling defects, many incongruities, many transgressions against what the French would call les convenances; and which are tolerated, not because we approve of all these blemishes, but because we find them amply compensated by a host of unappreciable beauties. This period continued till about the middle of the seventeenth century, when Charles II., returning from the continent, brought back the reign of pleasure and false taste of every kind. It had indeed been interrupted by the puritans, about twenty years earlier; but then it had the good fortune to escape innovation, and no diminutive substitute usurped its place. But the courtiers under Charles II. as if resolved to avenge themselves of the rigidity of the puritan faction which had preceded them in power, gave a loose to every species of immorality, and largely drew on foreign countries for a supply of vices which they did not find at home. A taste for dissipation became a proof of royalism; and the elegant depravity of the court of Lewis XIV. was imitated with all the awkwardness of affectation,

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