itation of the manners of the guardroom and of the house; I can only believe in Jack Cade's sedition on aring the dirty words of bestial lewdness and mobbish pidity. You must let me have the jests, the coarse ghter drunkenness, the manners of butchers and oners, to make me imagine a mob or an election. So murders, let me feel the fire of bubbling passion, the cumulation of despair or hate which have unchained te will and nerved the hand. When the unchecked ords, the fits of rage, the convulsive ejaculations of asperated desire, have brought me in contact with all te links of the inward necessity which has moulded te man and guided the crime, I no longer think whether e knife is bloody, because I feel with inner treming the passion which has handled it. Have I to if Shakspeare's Cleopatra be really dead? The Fange laugh that bursts from her when the basket asps is brought, the sudden tension of nerves, the w of feverish words, the fitful gaiety, the coarse nguage, the torrent of ideas with which she overflows, ve already made me sound all the depths of suicide,1 1 "He words me, girls; he words me, that I should not Thou, an Egyptian puppet shalt be shown In Rome, as well as I: mechanic slaves, With greasy aprons, rules and hammers, shall Saucy lictors Will catch at us, like strumpets; and scald rhymers Extemporally will stage us, and present Our Alexandrian revels; Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I' the posture of a whore. 1 and I have foreseen it as soon as she came on the stares the author's words, who bids her half-mad mistre Husband, I come : Now to that name my courage prove my title! I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life. So; have you done? Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?" Shakspeare's Antony and Cleopatra, 5 of a courtesan and an artist. 1 "Iras. Call reason to assist you. Cleopatra. I have none, And none would have: My love's a noble madness Fits vulgar love, and for a vulgar man ; But I have loved with such transcendant passion, I soared, at first, quite out of reason's view, And now am lost above it." -All for Love, v. 2. 1. ices and whimpering, voluptuous and a coquette, neither the nobleness of virtue, nor the greatness "Nature meant me A wife; a silly, harmless household dove, Fond without art, and kind without deceit." 1 ay, Nature meant nothing of the kind, or otherwise this tle-dove would not have tamed or kept an Antony; woman without any prejudices alone could do it, by the periority of boldness and the fire of genius. I can see ready from the title of the piece why Dryden has oftened Shakspeare: All for Love; or, the World well What a wretchedness, to reduce such events to a astoral, to excuse Antony, to praise Charles II. indiectly, to bleat as in a sheepfold! And such was the taste His contemporaries. When Dryden wrote the Tempest fter Shakspeare, and the State of Innocence after Milton, egain spoiled the ideas of his masters; he turned ve and Miranda into courtesans; he extinguished everywhere, under conventionalism and indecencies, ne frankness, severity, delicacy, and charm of the riginal invention. By his side, Settle, Shadwell, Sir Robert Howard did worse. The Empress of Morocco, Settle, was so admired, that the gentlemen and dies of the court learned it by heart, to play at Whitehall before the king. And this was not a passing noy; although modified, the taste was to endure. In Dryden's Miranda, says, in the Tempest (2. 2): "And if I can escape with life, I had rather be in pain nine months, as my ther threatened, than lose my longing.". Miranda has a sister; they arrel, are jealous of each other, and so on. See also in The State of nocence, 3. 1, the description which Eve gives of her happiness, and the ideas which her confidences suggest to Satan. vain poets rejected a part of the French alloy wher with they had mixed their native metal; in vain the y returned to the old unrhymed verses of Jonson and Shakspeare; in vain Dryden, in the parts of Anton Ventidius, Octavia, Don Sebastian, and Dorax, recovere a portion of the old naturalness and energy; in vai Otway, who had real dramatic talent, Lee and Souther attained a true or touching accent, so that once, in Veni Preserved, it was thought that the drama would b regenerated. The drama was dead, and tragedy could not replace it; or rather each one died by the other and their union, which robbed them of strength Dryden's time, enervated them also in the time of hi successors. Literary style blunted dramatic truth dramatic truth marred literary style; the work wa neither sufficiently vivid nor sufficiently well written the author was too little of a poet or of an orator; le had neither Shakspeare's fire of imagination nor Racines polish and art.1 He strayed on the boundaries of two dramas, and suited neither the half-barbarous men art nor the well-polished men of the court. Such indeed was the audience, hesitating between two forms of thought, fed by two opposite civilisations. They had no longer the freshness of feelings, the depth of impre sion, the bold originality and poetic folly of the cav liers and adventurers of the Renaissance; nor will the ever acquire the aptness of speech, gentleness manners, courtly habits, and cultivation of sentiment and thought which adorned the court of Louis XI They are quitting the age of solitary imagination and invention, which suits their race, for the age of reasoning and worldly conversation, which does not suit their race 1 This impotence reminds one of Casimir Delavigne. ey lose their own merits, and do not acquire the erits of others. They were meagre poets and ill-bred artiers, having lost the art of imagination and having Got yet acquired good manners, at times dull or brutal, times emphatic or stiff. For the production of fine betry, race and age must concur. This race, diverging om its own age, and fettered at the outset by foreign nitation, formed its classical literature but slowly; it ill only attain it after transforming its religious and olitical condition: the age will be that of English ason. Dryden inaugurates it by his other works, d the writers who appear in the reign of Queen Anne ill give it its completion, its authority, and its lendour. V. But let us pause a moment longer to inquire whether, nid so many abortive and distorted branches, the old eatrical stock, abandoned by chance to itself, will not oduce at some point a sound and living shoot. When man like Dryden, so gifted, so well informed and perienced, works with a will, there is hope that he ill some time succeed; and once, in part at least, ryden did succeed. It would be treating him unjustly be always comparing him with Shakspeare; but en on Shakspeare's ground, with the same materials, is possible to create a fine work; only the reader aust forget for a while the great inventor, the inexhaustle creator of vehement and original souls, and to Consider the imitator on his own merits, without rcing an overwhelming comparison. There is vigour and art in this tragedy of Dryden, ll for Love. "He has informed us, that this was the |