blasphemy for sublimity, and ribaldry for wit. He had so little notion of his own powers, that he has put Milton's Paradise Lost into dramatic rhyme to make Adam look like a fine gentleman; and has added a double love-plot to the Tempest, to "relieve the killing languor and overlaboured lassitude" of that solitude of the imagination, in which Shakespear had left the inhabitants of his Enchanted Island. I will give two passages out of Don Sebastian in illustration of what I have said above of this mock-heroic style.

Almeyda advising Sebastian to fly from the power of Muley-Moluch addresses him thus:

"Leave then the luggage of your fate behind;
To make your flight more easy, leave Almeyda.
Nor think me left a base, ignoble prey,
Exposed to this inhuman tyrant's lust.
My virtue is a guard beyond my strength;
And death my last defence within my

Sebastian answers very gravely:

call."

"Death may be called in vain, and cannot come :
Tyrants can tye him up from your relief:
Nor has a Christian privilege to die.
Alas, thou art too young in thy new faith:
Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls,
And give them furloughs for another world:
But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand,
In starless nights, and wait the appointed hour."

Sebastian then urging her to prevent the tyrant's designs by an instant marriage, she says,

""Tis late to join, when we must part so soon.
Sebastian. Nay, rather let us haste it, e'er we part:
Our souls for want of that acquaintance here

May wander in the starry walks above,

And, forced on worse companions, miss ourselves."

In the scene with Muley-Moluch where she makes intercession for Sebastian's life, she says,

st My father's, mother's, brother's death I pardon:
That's somewhat sure, a mighty sum of murder,
Of innocent and kindred blood struck off.
My prayers and penance shall discount for these,
And beg of Heaven to charge the bill on me:
Behold what price I offer, and how dear
To buy Sebastian's life.

Emperom. Let after-reckonings trouble fearful fools; I'll stand the trial of those trivial crimes:

But since thou begg'st me to prescribe my terms,

The only I can offer are thy love;

And this one day of respite to resolve.

Grant or deny, for thy next word is Fate;

And Fate is deaf to Prayer.

Almeyda. May heav'n be so

At thy last breath to thine: I curse thee not:
For who can better curse the plague or devil
Than to be what they are? That curse be thine.
Now do not speak, Sebastian, for you need not,
But die, for I resign your life: Look heav'n,
Almeyda dooms her dear Sebastian's death
But is there heaven, for I begin to doubt?

The skies are hush'd; no grumbling thunders roll:
Now take your swing, ye impious: sin, unpunish'd.
Eternal Providence seems over-watch'd,

And with a slumbering nod assents to murder.
Farewell, my lost Sebastian!

I do not beg, I challenge Justice now:
O Powers, if Kings be your peculiar care,
Why plays this wretch with your prerogative?
Now flash him dead, now crumble him to ashes:
Or henceforth live confined in your own palace;
And look not idly out upon a world
That is no longer yours."

These passages, with many like them, will be found in the first scene of the third act.

The occasional striking expressions, such as that of souls at the resurrection "fumbling for their limbs," are the language of strong satire and habitual disdain, not proper to tragic or serious poetry.

After Dryden there is no writer that has acquired much reputation as a tragic poet for the next hundred years. In the hands of his successors, the Smiths, the Hughes, the Hills, the Murphys, the Dr. Johnsons, of the reigns of George I. and II., tragedy seemed almost afraid to know itself, and certainly did not stand where it had done a hundred and fifty years before. It had degenerated by regular and studied gradations

into the most frigid, insipid, and insignificant of all things. It faded to a shade, it tapered to a point, "fine by degrees, and beautifully less." I do not believe there is a single play of this period which could be read with any degree of interest or even patience, by a modern reader of poetry, if we except the productions of Southern, Lillo and Moore, the authors of the Gamester, Oroonoko, and Fatal Curiosity, and who instead of mounting on classic stilts and making rhetorical flourishes, went out of the established road to seek for truth and nature and effect in the commonest life and lowest situations. In short, the only tragedy of this period is that to which their productions gave a name, and which has been called in contradistinction by the French, and with an express provision for its merits and defects, the tragedie bourgeoise. An anecdote is told of the first of these writers by Gray, in one of his Letters, dated from Horace Walpole's countryseat, about the year 1740, who says, "Old Mr. Southern is here, who is now above 80: a very agreeable old man, at least I think so when I look in his face, and think of Isabella and Oroonoko." It is pleasant to see these traits of attachment and gratitude kept up in successive generations of poets to one another, and also to find that the same works of genius that have "sent us weeping to our beds," and made us "rise sadder

and wiser on the morrow morn," have excited just the same fondness of affection in others before we were born; and it is to be hoped, will do so, after we are dead. Our best feelings, and those on which we pride ourselves most, and with most reason, are perhaps the commonest of all others.

Up to the present reign, and during the best part of it (with another solitary exception, Douglas, which with all its feebleness and extravagance, has in its style and sentiments a good deal of poetical and romantic beauty) tragedy wore the face of the Goddess of Dulness in the Dunciad, serene, torpid, sickly, lethargic, and affected, till it was roused from its trance by the blast of the French Revolution, and by the loud trampling of the German Pegasus on the English stage, which now appeared as pawing to get free from its ancient trammels, and rampant shook off the incumbrance of all former examples, opinions, prejudices, and principles. If we have not been alive and well since this period, at least we have been alive, and it is better to be alive than dead. The German tragedy (and our own, which is only a branch of it) aims at effect, and produces it often in the highest degree; and it does this by going all the lengths not only of instinctive feeling, but of