well enough disposed to treat you with distant respect, but you have courted and demanded our gaze. You have bared your bosom when no man entreated you; it is your own fault if we have seen there not the scars of honourable wounds, but the festering blackness of a loathsome disease. You have been the vainest and the most egotistical of poets. You have made yourself your only theme; shall we not dare to dissect the hero, because, forsooth, he and his poet are the same? You have debased your nobility by strutting upon the stage; shall we still be expected to talk of you as of a private and unobtrusive individual? You must share the fate of your brethren, and abide the judgment of the spectators. Having assumed, for our amusement, these gaudy trappings, you must not hope to screen your blunders from our castigation, by a sudden and prudish retreat into a less glittering costume. You have made your election.-The simile which I have employed may appear inept to many; of these, I well know, your Lordship is not one.

You made your debut in the utmost dignity and sadness of the Cothurnus. You were the most lugubrious of mortals; it was the main ambition of your vanity to attract to your matchless sorrows the overflowing sympathies of the world. We gave you credit for being sincere in your affliction. We looked upon you as the victim of more than human misery, and sympathized with the extravagance of your public and uncontrollable lamentations. It is true that no one knew whence your sorrow had sprung, but we were generous in our compassion, and asked few questions. In time, however, we have become less credulous and more inquisitive; the farce was so often renewed, that we became weary of its wonders; we have come to suspect at last, that whatever sorrows you may have, they are all of your own creating; and that, whencesoever they may be, they are at least neither of so uniform nor of so majestic a character as you would fain have had us to suppose.

There was indeed something not a little affecting in the spectacle of youth, nobility, and genius, doomed to a perpetual sighing over the treachery of earthly hopes, and the vanity of I earthly enjoyments. Admitting, as

we did to its full extent, the depth of your woes, it is no wonder that we were lenient critics of the works of such a peerless sufferer. We reverenced your mournful muse; we were willing to believe that, if such was her power in the midst of tears, a brighter fortune would have made it unrivalled and irresistible. The forlornness of your bosom gained you the forbearance of the most unrelenting judges. Every thing was pardoned to the chosen victim of destiny. We regarded you as the very masterpiece and symbol of affliction, and looked up to you the more that your glory had been withered

"As when Heaven's fire Had scathed the forest oak, or mountainpine,

With singed top his stately growth, though bare,

Stands on the blasted heath."

Although, however, we at the time believed what you told us, and opened all the stores of our pity to your moving tale, we have not been able to abstain, in the sequel, from considering somewhat more calmly the items of its horror. The first thing which made us suspect that we had been played upon, was the vehemence of your outcries. If your account of yourself were a true one, your heart was broken. You decked yourself in the sable trappings of a Hamlet, and, like him, you were free to confess that "the earth seemed to you only a sterile promontory, and the goodly canopy of heaven a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. You had no pleasure in Man, no! nor, for all our smiling, in Woman neither." You stood like another Niobe, a cold and marble statue, frozen by despair amidst the ruin of your hopes. Had your sorrow been so deep, my Lord, its echoes had been lower. The dignified sufferer needs no circle of listeners to fan, by their responding breath, the expiring embers of misery. Poetry was born within you, and you must have made it the companion of your afflictions; but your lyre, like that of the bereaved hero of old, would have uttered lonely and unobtrusive notes, had your fingers, like his, been touched with the real tremblings of agony. A truly glorious spirit, sunk in sorrow such as you assumed, might have well deserved the silent veneration of its more lowly and more happy contem

plators. But it would neither have courted their notice nor enjoyed their sympathy. Alone, in its gigantic wretchedness, it would have scorned to lay its troubles open to the gaze of common men. Your delicacy was less exquisite, or your grief was less sincere. You howled by day upon the house-top you called upon all the world to admire your song of lamentation, and to join their voices in its doleful chorus.

Under pretence of making us partakers in a fictitious or exaggerated grief, you have striven to make us sympathize with all the sickly whims and phantasies of a self-dissatisfied and self-accusing spirit. That you were, as you have yourself told us, a dissipated, a sceptical, and therefore, for there was no other cause, a wretched man, was no reason why you should wish to make your readers devoid of religion, virtue, and happiness. You had no right to taint the pure atmosphere of the English mind with the infectious phrenzies of the fever of debauch. Your misery was the punishment of your folly and your wickedness; why did you come to rack the eyes of the wise, the good, and the tranquil, with the loathsome spectacle of your merited torments? Could genius, a thousand times more splendid than yours, entitle the poor, giddy, restless victim of remorse, to make his art the instrument of evil,-to abuse the gifts of his God, by rendering them the engines of corruption and ruin among his fellow-men? For shame! my Lord, for shame upon your manhood! If you had acted as became the dignity, either of your person or of your genius, you would have hidden yourself from the public gaze, until you had expiated, in the solitude of some congenial dungeon, the sins that had embittered your conscience, and degraded your muse. You had offended the eternal laws of virtue, and yielded up your self-condemning soul to be the play-thing-the si vyμ-of doubt, and of derision. But although you felt within yourself the hell of conscience, why should you have assumed at once the malevolence of a demon? Alas! you have not even attained to the generosity of "the superior fiend." While the abject instruments of his rebellious rage found comfort in the companionship of many, the Satan of Milton preserved a nobler sentiment in the midst

I have a singular pleasure, I know not how, in quoting to your Lordship the lines of Milton. You cannot listen to their high and melancholy music, without reflecting with repentant humiliation on your own perverted and dishonoured genius. To his pure ear, the inspirations of the muse came placid and solemn, with awful and majestic cadences. She ruffled not, but smoothed and cherished the wings of his contemplation. She breathed the calm of a holier harmony into his unspotted bosom. Reason and imagination went hand in hand with virtue. He never forgot that his poetry was given him, only to be the ornament and instrument of a patriot and a saint. Beside your pillow the nightly visitant" respires the contaminating air of its pollution. The foul exhalations of disorder and sensuality poison her virgin breath, and dim the celestial lustre of her eye. In despair of ennobling you, she becomes herself degraded, and lends her vigour to be the weapon of that violence, which, had its phrenzy been less incurable, her ministrations might have soothed and tempered. Milton is to you as his own cherub was to the apostate. "That glory then, when thou no more wast good,

His very name is to your unwilling Departed from thee." when you reflect upon the beauty of a grave rebuke;" and you feel, his purity, as the revolted demon did in the place inviolable.”

"Abashed the devil stood,

And felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her own shape more lovely; saw, and pined

His loss: but chiefly to find here observed His lustre visibly impaired."

Visible, however, as was your apostacy, and mean your vengeance, there was still something about you to create respect, even in those who comprehended the best your vices and your errors. If you were an immoral and an unchristian, you were at least a serious, poet. Your pictures of depravity were sketched with such a sombre magnificence, that the eye of vulgar observers could gain little from surveying their lineaments. The harp of the mighty was still in your hands; and when you dashed your fingers over its loosened strings, faded as was the harmony, and harsh the execution, the notes were still made for their listening, who had loved the solemn music of the departed.

The last lingering talisman which secured to you the pity, and almost the pardon, even of those that abhorred your guilt,-with the giddiness of a lunatic, or the resolution of a suicide, -you have tossed away. You have lost the mournful and melancholy harp which lent a protecting charm even to the accents of pollution; and bought, in its stead, a gaudy viol, fit for the fingers of eunuchs, and the ears of courtezans. You have parted

"With what permissive glory, since that fall, Was left

You have flung off the last remains of the "regal port;" you are no longer one of" the great seraphic lords," that sat even in Pandemonium, "in their own dimensions like themselves." You have grown weary of your fallen grandeur, and dwarfed your stature, that you might gain easier access, and work paltrier mischief. You may resume, if you will, your giant-height, but we shall not fail to recognise, in spite of all your elevation, the swollen features of the same pigmy imp whom we have once learned a lasting lesson-not to abhor merely, and execrate, but to despise. You may wish, as heretofore, to haunt our imaginations in the shadowy semblance of Harold, Conrad, Lara, or Manfred: you may retain their vice, and their unbelief, and their restlessness; but you have parted irretrievably with the majesty of their despair. We see you in a shape less sentimental and mysterious. We look VOL. III.

below the disguise which has once been lifted, and claim acquaintance, not with the sadness of the princely masque, but with the scoffing and sardonic merriment of the ill-dissembling reveller beneath it. In evil hour did you step from your vantage-ground, and teach us that Harold, Byron, and the Count of Beppo are the same. I remain, My Lord,

with much pity, and not entirely without hope, Your Lordship's

most obedient,

most humble servant, PRESBYTER ANGLICANUS.

NOTICES OF THE ACTED DRAMA IN

LONDON.

No VI.

We have seen Mr Elliston in the Duke Aranza, and in Archer. We were so much accustomed to receive unmixed pleasure from this gentleman's acting, before we were either capable or desirous of judging of its merits, that we are quite unable to think or even talk critically about it now. But we may yet be permitted to say that his return is truly delightful to us. It gives us back an image of the very spring-time of our playgoing a time that we thought nothing could have restored even the resemblance of. It is, indeed, only an image. A dim one,-like that of a beautiful woman seen in a mirror covered with gauze; or a starry sky reflected in a lake over which a breeze is passing-wavering and indistinct, but still lovely.-Criticism is a good thing enough in its way-but one hour of that time was worth a whole eternity of it. Then, what did we care how the magazines or newspapers thought or spoke of the last new play? What was it to us whether it was a good or a bad one? We neither knew or desired to know any thing about the matter. It was a play-and that was enough for us. It made us happy-and what could we wish for more? Oh! "Either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, &c.""Scene undividable or poem unlimited,"-that was your only time! Lillo was not too heavy," nor O'Keefe too light."

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We have learned better since then; 2 T

and are heartily sorry for it. We have pryed into the arcana of nature and of art, and paid dearly for our curiosity. We have acquired just skill enough to take the Kaleidoscope to pieces, and find that its beautiful and ever-varying forms are composed of nothing but beads and bits of broken glass. But why should we complain ? In learning to take the machine to pieces, we have also learned to put it together again so that the delight we receive in looking through it is only changed in its kind,-not destroyed. That which was a restless and everchanging admiration, has become a quiet and permanent love. Then, we gloried in the skies and the trees and the flowers, because we felt that the presence of them made us happy: now, if we glory in them less we love them more-for we know that at least they ought to make us happy; and that if they do not, it is not their fault but ours.

But the memory of what has been is enticing us to forget what is the play-house, Mr Elliston, and every thing else. And this is not as it should be for in "this visible, diurnal, sphere," this real world in which we live, there are few better places than a play-house. For our own parts, we know of none,-except an open common, and an enclosed garden. Why these are better than a play-house, or any other place, we cannot stop to tell. And if we could, it would be fruitless to attempt to make those understand what we mean, who do not already feel it.

We said in our last, that the absence of Mr Elliston had deprived the theatre of that delightful class of characters which he alone was capable of representing. But perhaps we did not attribute the neglect of them to the right cause. The characters themselves have become obsolete, because their prototypes are no longer to be found in real life: And with all their charms they are not of a kind to maintain their influence over us for any length of time, when we know that they are nonentities. There was nothing essentially natural in them. They were not sufficiently founded on the permanent, to be allowed to rank as pictures. They affected us as an authentic bust or portrait does,-because they were copies of nature; not as the Apollo does,-precisely because it is not a copy, but an imitation.

They arose out of a certain state of society, and have decayed with the decay of that state.

In fact, the beau ideal of a man of fashion is extinct among us, as well on the stage as in the drawing-room. Those delightful creatures, the Sir Harry Wildairs, Young Mirabels, &c. are superseded by stiff neckcloths, tight pantaloons, and the milling cut. The former must have been very mischievous people. They seemed "framed to make women false," so that the change is perhaps for the better-unless we admit the maxim, that it is better to do mischief than to do nothing. Indeed our modern Mirabels are the most harmless if not the most innocent creatures in the world. They would not injure a lady's honour if they could, if it required any trouble;

and they could not if they would, if it required any wit. Then as for love,-the very name as well as the thing is prescribed among them-from the court to the city-from White's to the Stock Exchange. Damages have taken the place of duels-horses of mistresses

and boxing of intrigue. Or if they do fight now and then, it is not to defend a woman's honour, for they would scorn to own a woman who had any; or to prove that they possess it themselves: but merely to show that they have nerves and impudence enough to do without it.-Then if they drink, it is not to get wit or spirits, but to get drunk. Even Burgundy— "dear, delightful Burgundy!" can do nothing for them-for their stomachs are as hard as their faces: or if it makes any change at all in them it is that it finds them fools and leaves them beasts.

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In short, a modern rake is a perfect negation of all possible qualities, good, bad, or indifferent. He has no knowledge, no fancy, no wit, no imagination, no passions-he has no love and no hate-no pride, no vanity, no ambition-no hopes, no fears-no taste, no feeling, no manners, no nothing." -Yes-he has a body,-as every modest woman who is obliged to pass along Bond Street at a certain hour can testify, when three of the species, linked together, shoulder her off the pavement. A body which, to make it complete, is endowed with the head of a pin, the stomach of an ostrich, and the nerves of a brick wall.

We hope that now Mr Elliston has returned to the theatre, he will remain

there. For these nameless non-entities have hitherto been confined to the lobbies, the park, and the fashionable streets; and they do no harm there, except to block up the way. But if

well-formed youth spring up, to occupy the places which they do but encumber. A. Z.

OSCOPE, WITH REMARKS ON ITS SUPPOSED RESEMBLANCE TO OTHER COMBINATIONS OF PLAIN MIRRORS.

We must now take leave of our readers till the next season. We hope a month's unceasing fine weather will account for and excuse our meagre Notices of the Acted Drama in London, in this and the last Number. The sun has, of late years, been so rare a visitant, and is always so welcome a one to us, that we could not persuade ourselves to pay him so ill a compliment as to leave his presence even for that of gas-lights and gay faces; though by the way, these latter do not now greet us at the theatres so frequently as we could wish. Old Drury in particular,-who was once a favourite with us,-seems to be getting into her dotage, and has lately not been able to see company." She is becoming progressively worse and worse, under the hands of the amateur practitioners who have undertaken to prescribe for her during her last attack. And no wonder-for they do not understand her case. It lies in a nut-shell. Her disorder consists in a mal-formation of parts. The body is too large for the limbs to support. And, to utter an ungracious truth, the sooner she and her unweildy neighbour in Covent Garden "depart this life," the better. For this latter is afflicted in the same way; and though a more vigorous constitution, and more judicious treatment, have enabled her to bear up against the disease with less apparent injury to her general health, yet she must sink under it at last. We hope it is not inhuman to wish, as we heartily do, that they were both out of their misery. We might then have a chance of seeing a healthy and

As this instrument has excited great attention, both in this country and on the Continent, we have no doubt that our readers will take some interest in the history of the invention. In the year 1814, when Dr Brewster was engaged in experiments on the polarisation of light by successive reflections between plates of glass, which were published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1815, and honoured by the Royal Society of London with the Copley Medal, the reflectors were in some cases inclined to each other, and he had occasion to remark the circular arrangement of the images of a candle round a centre, or the multiplication of the sectors formed by the extremities of the glass plates. In repeating, at a subsequent period, the experiments of M. Biot on the action of fluids upon light, Dr B. placed the fluids in a trough formed by two plates of glass cemented together at an angle. The eye being necessarily placed at one end, some of the cement which had been pressed through between the plates appeared to be arranged into a regular figure. The symmetry of this figure being very remarkable, Dr B. set himself to investigate the cause of the phenomenon, and in doing this he discovered the leading principles of the Kaleidoscope. He found that, in order to produce perfectly beautiful and symmetrical forms, three conditions were necessary.

1. That the reflectors should be placed at an angle, which was an even or an odd aliquot part of a circle, when the object was regular, and wholly included in the aperture; or the even aliquot part of a circle when the object was irregular.

2. That out of an infinite number of positions for the object both within and without the reflectors, there was only one position where perfect symmetry could be obtained, namely, by placing the object in contact with the ends of the reflectors.