ing, we admire not only the composition and the whole of the group, but if we confine our attention to a single figure, we find it beautifully drawn and highly finished. Most of the modern plays fall infinitely short in this respect. The persons taken singly are nothing-they have no strong features to distinguish them. A modern dramatic writer will paint a virtuous man or a vicious man; but he gives him nothing but the general marks of the character: you admire or you detest his actions, and you hear him speaking either good moral sentiments or purposes of villany; but examine this hero or this villain, he wants particular features; he cannot be described; he resembles those masks or vizards, which were worn by the Greek and Roman comedians, of which one was painted to express each of the passions, and the same mask was constantly worn as often as the same passion was to be repre sented. In the modern plays, too, a correctness of language, a harmony of numbers, and a brilliancy of metaphor, have come in place of that natural warmth, that unforced and passionate expression, which eminently distinguished the old dramatic compositions. The tragi-comedy (I do not mean where there are two distinct plots, which is a very unnatural species of composition, but where there is a mixture in the same plot of serious and ludicrous personages) seems now to be laid aside by our dramatic writers, deterred, as it would appear, by the censure of Addison; yet, with great deference to so judicious a critic, I cannot help thinking that his opinion would deprive us of a very rational source of pleasure. We may appeal to the example of some of the finest plays in our language whether the introducing a comic scene has a bad effect, even when succeeding or succeeded by another of the deepest distress. Where the comic characters have their business in the tragic plot, and the whole tends to one interesting event, as there is nothing but what is consonant to nature in such mixture of characters, so there is nothing which shocks our feelings. It is not unnatural that clownish servants should jest while their master is in aliotion; and a short scene of this kind, exhibited as it were in passing on to the serious parts, instead of violating our feelings, has the effect perhaps of heightening our pathetic emotions, by the sudden, strong, and unexpected contrast of happiness and misery. The old dramatic writers perhaps went to an extreme, and sacrificed too much to the taste of a populace delighted with ribaldry and buffoonery; but they certainly err as much on the other side who have banished all association of the comic and the tragic in the same composition. To those who are admirers of a strict conformity to dramatic rules, we would recommend the compositions of the French stage towards the middle of the last century. If dramatic poetry is to be considered as an exhibition of the characters of mankind, which some very good critics have defined it to be, the French drama, in this respect, at least their tragedy, must be allowed to be much inferior to the English. If considered as an artificial composition, recommending virtue by example, and exposing vice, we acknowledge the drama of the French to have better attained those important ends. In the dramatic compositions of either nation, we find there is room for the introduction both of sublime and of pathetic sentiments; but in the French drama we admire the art of the poet, who describes a feeling, while in the English we sympathize with the character who expresses it. Till the middle of the seventeenth century, dramatic poetry among the French was extremely low. Pierre Corneille is allowed to have brought it at once to the highest pitch of excellence which it has ever attained. We cannot say that Corneille has not availed himself of the compositions in other languages; for besides that the correct regularity of his pieces demonstrates a thorough acquaintance with the rules of the drama, he has borrowed some of his plots both from the Greek tragedians and some of the dramatic writers of Spain. Yet a proof that the genius of Corneille was more original than the effects of study, is, that his earliest pieces, written in his youth, are better than those which were the fruit of his maturer years and more cultivated judgment. Of thirty-three pieces, there are no more than six or seven which still keep possession of the French stage, and will probably maintain their ground for ever. The tragedy of the Cid, Rodogune, Cinna, Polyeucte, Les Horaces, have never yet been surpassed by any dramatic writers among the French. The Menteur of Corneille shows that his genius could adapt itself equally to comedy and to tragedy. This great poet enjoyed already a very high reputation, when Racine appeared, to dispute with him the palm of dramatic composition. Corneille, with more of the sublime of poetry, had less acquaintance with the tender passions. It is here that the forte of Racine lay. The pathetic of Britannicus is superior to any thing that Corneille has attempted in the same style. Athalie is full of grandeur and dignity of sentiment, and the comedy of the Plaideurs shows that the genius of Racine was as universal as that of his great competitor. But the palm of French comedy was reserved for Molière. It may perhaps be said of the comedies of Molière, that they are the only examples of that species of composition which have actually produced a sensible effect in reforming the manners of the age. The French physicians in his time were precisely what he represents them-illiterate, mysterious, and ignorant quacks. The women of fashion were overrun with a pedantic affectation of learning; and the French nobility affected that arrogant and supercilious demeanor which demands respect from the conside ration of birth or fortune, without the possession of a single laudable or valuable quality. The keen but delicate satire of Molière produced a very sensible reformation; and the latter part of the reign of Louis XIV. was as entirely free from the quackery of physic, the pedantry of the ladies, and the absurd pride of the nobility, as the commencement of it was marked by those characteristics. The last eminent dramatic writer among the French who distinguished the seventeenth century was Crebillon, who is the only one of the French poets of the stage, if we except Voltaire, who has drawn his images of the sublime from the source of terror. In tragedy he had before him the models of Corneille. and Racine, but his genius was original, and he disdained to imitate. His pieces are, therefore, deficient in that correctness, or that polish in the structure of the verses, which is the fruit of study and of imitation; but he must be a tasteless critic, who, in reading the tragedy of Radamiste et Zénobie, or of Atrée et Thyeste, feels his passions so disengaged as to attend to the irregulairty of a verse or the harshness of a cadence. Let us observe, too, to the honor of Crebillon, that in all his pieces. virtue and morality are powerfully inculcated-a characteristic to distinguish him from a worthless son, the younger Crebillon, who, in a variety of licentious novels, has prostituted excellent talents in the service of vice. With the mention of the principal historians who adorned the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I close this hasty sketch of European literature. In France we find, as historians of that period, De Thou and Davila. The History of the president De Thou, comprehending the annals of his own time, from 1545 to 1607, is written with great judgment and impartiality. He wrote in Latin, and his style, with considerable purity, has an uncommon degree of force and elevation. Davila, an Italian, has no other title to be classed among the French historians than having long resided in France, and written of the affairs of that kingdom. His History of the Civil Wars of France, from the death of Henry II. to the peace of Vervins, in 1598, and the establishment of Henry IV. upon the throne, is written in excellent Italian, and, if considered as the composition of a partisan, is marked by no common degree of candor and impartiality. In Italy, Machiavel, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, composed his History of Florence, a work classical in point of style, though not always to be depended on in point of fact. Bentivoglio, in his History of the Civil Wars of Flanders, has united great political knowledge with perspicuity of narration and force of language. He is often wonderfully eloquent. As a model of the perfect historical style, we cannot recommend a finer example than Bentivoglio's introduction to the work we have mentioned. Among the English historians, Sir Walter Raleigh possesses a purity of language remarkable for the times in which he lived: for the age of James I. was distinguished by a false and vicious taste in writing. But his chief excellence is his judicious selection of facts. His History of the World, though a work of great judgment and perspicuity, is yet in point of style rather beneath that dignity of expression which is required in historical composition. Clarendon has great natural powers; no author possessed more acuteness in discerning characters, or a happier talent in delineating them. He is an author who is looked upon as a party writer, as every writer must be who gives the history of a period distinguished by the violence of party, and who relates transactions in which he himself was actively concerned. But Clarendon was a man of virtue and probity: he never wilfully misleads; and if we cannot implicitly assent to his political creed, we respect his talents and revere his integrity. At this period of the history of the world, the department of Universal History may be said to terminate. It would certainly be desirable that any work on so comprehensive a subject should include the widest range in point of time, and even embrace the events of the present age; but many circumstances conspire to render this difficult in a work on general history, and almost impossible in the form and for the purpose for which this work was composed, viz., as a course of lectures delivered from an academical chair in the University of Edinburgh. The quantity of important matter which accumulates as we reach the more recent periods-the interest which attaches itself to innumerable. events, less from their actual importance, than from their connection with the feelings and passions of the present day-conspire to render the materials of recent history of a magnitude so disproportioned to those which form the narrative of more distant periods, that no discrimination could suffice to condense them within the requisite compass. It is the lapse of time alone that settles the relative importance of such materials; that throws into the shade or blots out from the canvass, those details which, however interesting they may seem to the actors, are of no real value to posterity; and leaves the great picture of human affairs charged with such features only as deserve a lasting memorial, and preserve their importance long after their immediate interest has ceased to enhance it. It is not, therefore, in a work on General History that the student must expect to obtain a knowledge of his own times, or of those which immediately precede them; but the general views which he may here receive of the history of former ages, and that method and arrangement which he will here find pursued, will enable him to prosecute his historical studies with more real benefit to himself, and with less risk of being led astray by the partial and often contradictory statements of contemporary annalists. |