The life of Goldoni, the first comic writer who banished vandalism from the theatres of Italy, has been noticed at large in the Appendix to our lxxivth Volume, N. S., with a sort of promise that some account of his works should enter into the present critique. We must, however, be very brief in our observations. In general, this author allows but little room to sensibility; sentiment is by no means his province; his heroes are represented with all their faults, and frequently with vices exceeding the theatrical allowance; his principal characters are freely held up to ridicule; selfishness in their generosity, self-interest in their friendship, envy in their admiration, — and the prosaic, contracted, and vulgar side of human nature, are the mastersprings of Goldoni's characters. His fertility in design, however, and the natural turn of his dialogue, will most probably preserve for him the place among his countrymen which his name at present enjoys.

Except the Merope of Maffei, Italy had not one tragedy which deserved the name until Alfieri undertook to reform the serious, as Goldoni had already reformed the comic, scene. Metastasia is the poet of love, Alfieri the hardy champion of liberty. The former, allured by the delicacy of his ear, never wrote a period which was not in unison with the principles of music; while the latter appears ostentatiously to court breaks, asperities, and inharmonious cadences, to which the Italian language lends itself with reluctance. Here is no pastoral gentleness, no compromise with the feelings of his countrymen. seldom exceeding 1400 lines, supported by three or four cha racters, and rendered yet more grave by soliloquies and a cer tain laconicism of style which at times appears affected, with a monotony of circumstance and character, and a studied harshness resulting from the mind of the author, are the distinguishing features of Alfieri.

A drama

When speaking of the writers of Italy, we cannot but advert, as in our notice of the large obituary contained in the correspondence of Grimm, to the extreme old age to which the literary world of Italy as well as of France attained. In the present work, as in Grimm, the ages of 80 and 90 are of by no means uncommon occurrence.-Does this longevity result from temperance, from natural constitution, or from climate?

In the account rendered by M. DE SISMONDI of the literatures of Spain and Portugal, he professes to speak at the dicta tion of Bouterweck*, Dieze, and Schlegel; whose opinions he retails with a liberality which removes from himself the respon

* See our report of this writer's History of Spanish Literature, Appendix to Vol. lxx. N. S. p. 449.

sibility

sibility for their correctness. The fertility of Spanish authors is indeed tremendous; and their works are hitherto so little known, with the exception of the inimitable Cervantes, that we do not wonder at the advantageous position taken by the present author behind the names of those laborious Germans who have made the literature of Spain the peculiar object of inquiry. Their theatrical pieces surpass in number those of all Europe put together: but, independently of its inferiority to the literature of Italy, France, and England, the costume of Spanish literature is oriental.

The Cid is the oldest epic poem of any modern language; and, as a faithful painting of Spanish manners in the eleventh century, it is valuable: but as a poem it is barbarous. To the poem succeeded the Chronicle, and to the Chronicle the many romances painted on the same canvas. An extraordinary mixture of love and devotion produced in the fifteenth century certain mystical parodies on Scripture; such as the Seven Joys of Love, in imitation of the Seven Joys of the Holy Virgin; and the Ten Commandments of Love, a parody on those of Scripture, with other profanations. In the sixteenth century, while Spanish cruelty, heightened by the spectacles presented to them by their Inquisition, was busily exerted in deluging Europe and America with blood, the Boscans, Garcillasos, Mendozas, and Montemayores, all parties to the sanguinary scenes of their times, all blood-hounds in the pack of Charles the Fifth and his wretched successor, were amusing themselves with writing pastorals and sonnets, and serving up the same stale dishes to saturated Europe, which had in antient times been presented to it by pure and innocent lovers of the delights which they celebrated. Mendoza's fame, however, rests principally on his Lazarillo de Tormes, the beggar. This guste picaresco, this taste for beggary, and for the feats of ingenuity which it engenders, is peculiarly palatable to Castilian gravity; and if we may judge of the fraternity from the pictures of them presented by Mendoza and his imitators, (among them Le Sage,) the Spanish beggars are, of all sharpers, the most adroit, the most sensible to the esprit de corps, the most united, and the most profligate. Mendoza's history of the war of Grenada, which ended by the expulsion from Spain of eight hundred thousand Moors, the most industrious of its population, enjoys a well-deserved reputation. It is the last work which attempted to represent the odium and absurdity of the Inquisition; and from this circumstance its publication was prohibited for a century and a half after the writer's death.

If the authors above mentioned are possessed of merit too confined to arrest our attention, the universal eulogy bestowed on

Dol

Don Quixotte may excuse us, with yet better reason, from the notice of Cervantes. His great work admits of no other epithet than the inimitable: but of his dramatic pieces he speaks sensibly when he himself acknowleges the decided superiority of his contemporary Lope Vega de Carpio. This latter writer, who with Cervantes and Calderone shares the highest honours of literary glory among his countrymen, was, like Cervantes and the poets before mentioned, a soldier, and was among the military who composed that Invincible Armada of which the destruction was the safeguard of England. He was also one of the many improvisatori who were known at this period equally in Castile and in Italy. His comedies amount to the exorbitant number of eighteen hundred, to which must be added 400 pieces of different descriptions; and, as he was known to compose a drama of two thousand verses in rhyme, varied with ariettes, sonnets, songs, and rich in intrigues and unexpected adventures, in the course of one day, we must class his writings only among the better order of extemporary effusions, so dangerous in their effects on sense, taste, and poetry. Indeed, the dramatist himself frequently complained that he recited faster than his amanuenses could write; while the managers of the theatres, regardless of his future fame, and intent only on present advantages, retained him in daily and hourly employment, and allowed him not time to revise a single piece. These prodigious labours procured for their author as much money as renown, and he was at one time master of a hundred thousand ducats: but his inclination to charity and to a sumptuous course of living wasted all these resources; and, after a splen did career, he left but a small fortune at his demise. No poet has ever in his life-time enjoyed so much glory as Lope de Vega. In the streets, he was accompanied by a crowd whe saluted him by the appellation of the prodigy of nature; children followed him with cries of joy; and every eye was fixed on him. The College of Madrid, of which he was a member, chose him for its president; and Pope Urban VIII. sent to him the cross of Malta, the title of Doctor in theology, and the diploma of fiscal to the apostolic chamber: distinctions which he owed as much to his fanaticism as to his poetry. The Inquisition also elected him a familiar. In the midst of this homage paid to his talents, he died at the age of seventythree, A.D. 1635; and his obsequies were celebrated with royal pomp. Three bishops, in pontifical habits, officiated for three days at the funeral of this Phoenix of Spain, as he is called even in the title to his comedies. It is calculated that he had composed more than twenty-one millions three hundred thousand verses, written on 133,222 leaves of paper.'

The

The essence of the Spanish theatre, as perfected by Lope de Vega, is intrigue; a complication of incidents, of love, of stratagems, and of extraordinary combats. Hence we are assured that strangers, however well read in the language, are seldom able to follow or comprehend a piece represented on the theatres of Madrid; while true Spaniards, habituated to romantic adventures in all their windings, seize the thread of the narrative with inconceivable adroitness. In works written so rapidly as the dramas of Lope de Vega, we may admire the genius which sparkles and flashes in the progress of the scene : but we can by no means trace the master-hand, whose delineations will live in their primal force with ages unborn, and in countries the most remote. Since the time of Lope, comedy in Spain has been divided into the appellations of divine and human. The divine comedies are the miracles of saints, and, like the human, attempt to chain the attention wholly by the trick and wonder of the scene. In the human comedy, probability is not so much as kept in sight; the importance and interest of situations, the imbroglio, in a word, forming the only merit of the piece. One intrigue crosses another, and the embarrassment augments, until the author, not able to untie, coarsely cuts the knots by marrying as many couples as present themselves in the, dramatis persona.

Calderone, however, is considered as the king of the Spanish theatre by his own countrymen, and is placed by German critics at the head of the modern dramatists. He was born A.D. 1600, and commenced his theatrical labours at his fourteenth year: but, like most of his predecessors, he too entered into the army, and served a few campaigns in Flanders. Philip IV., who was devoted to the stage, called him near his person, gave him the ribband of St. Jago, and attached him permanently to his court. As he advanced in age, he applied his talents more and more to the divine comedy. Those who would wish to become intimately acquainted with this author would do well to consult Schlegel; from whom much information may be gained. To us and to M. DE SISMONDI, he appears over-rated by his German eulogist. Duels and assassination among the males,-intrigues that penetrate within their jalousies and even to the grates of their convents, among the females, and gallantries which separated husband and wife, were the morals of the age and of the drama of Calderone. If, however, the morals were false, the language of the dramatist (says the present author) was yet more artificial. Our limits compel us to pass over the severe but sensible criticism of M. DE S. on this famous writer, who died in his eighty-seventh year. It is to be regretted that he

has

has scarcely touched on the Italian and Spanish historians, or indeed on the prose of those countries in general.

In treating of the literature of the Portuguese, Bouterweck is still M. DE SISMONDI's guide. This people, like the nation of which they were formerly a province, were for centuries engaged in a war with their Moorish conquerors: but, of all modern Europeans, they have been most fitted to sing the charms of a pastoral life, because shepherds and their peaceful occupations are objects most frequently presented to the eyes of their poets. In their flourishing days, comprizing the short period in which Vasco di Gama made discoveries and Camöens sang the exploits of his crew, the Portuguese were divided into mariners, soldiers, and shepherds; and literature was rather the recreation of the soldier than the profession of the learned. Without a model for tragedy but in the antient drama of Greece, Antonio Ferreira distinguished the sixteenth century by his Ines de Castro, a wonderful flight for the age and circumstances in which he wrote. The glory of ungrateful Portugal, however, rests exclusively on unhappy Cambens. A contemporary of Ferreira, a soldier, a navigator, an exile, a pensioner on the contemptible Sebastian, and last of all a beggar, subsisting wholly on the alms procured from passengers in the streets of Lisbon by the attachment of an Indian servant, in every condition this miserable man was a poet, and devoted all his powers to the fame of a nation which misconceived him, and felt not their effect. The hero of Camöens is not so much

Vasco di Gama as his country. The subject which he has chosen, the details of navigation into which he falls, and the mixture of Pagan and Christian notions, are undoubtedly flaws in this grand poem: but his episodes of Ines, and Adamastor, the spirit of the Cape, shrink not from a competition with the graces of the Italian school.

With the death of Camöens the literature of Portugal has so entirely declined, that, if a stranger should call for the works of any other poet even in a shop at Lisbon, the bookseller would not comprehend him. Indeed, the affinity of language, and the ascendancy of Spain, make the Portuguese tributary to their neighbours for most of their literary enjoyments. With a review of the four Roman dialects, the Provençal, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, M. DE SISMONDI closes his labours on southern literature. The French, the most celebrated of the languages born from the Latin,' has been too often and too well treated to demand from him a new analysis: but he prepares us for his excursions into northern literature; and we wish him health and leisure for the undertaking.

APP. REV. VOL. LXXVI.

Kk

ART.