more than compensates for its critical defects- quamvis perfida, cara tamen-but we cannot be blind to the fact, that this habit of thought and this style of composition are much at variance with the very essence of dramatic poetry, which has but little room to exhibit its various powers of excitement, which, despising all that is trifling, and dismissing all that is irrelevant, deals only with the important and the interesting; which must act strongly on the feelings, the affections, the passions; which must skilfully conduct an important plot through a few short scenes to a natural and necessary termination; which must bind up in a short compass the long tissue of life; which must clothe the philosophy of passion in the absolute garb of real and individual character, preserve a constantly progressing dramatic movement, make the most of every word, action, and thought, and which must, as it were, follow and gather up all the floating. wrecks of man's disastrous and erring will, as they are drifting across the dark tide of destiny, and collect them on the shore to build a forlorn memorial to his fame.

It is given but to few to excel in various ways. Great strength refuses to be joined to great flexibility; where we attempt a variety of attainment and pursuit, there is much danger of becoming superficial and weak. The old tragedians of Greece were tragedians and nothing else. Sophocles wrote more than a century of plays, but he wrote neither epics, cyclics, nor pastorals. It is seldom that a poet can avoid carrying one favourite style of composition into another. Thus Gray owned that he was so accustomed to the high finish, the rich elaboration, the beautiful miniature-painting of his lyrical style, that he could not satisfy himself with the plainer and more varied character of the didactic poem. So it was with many of our dramatic aspirants; they brought to the stage their offerings, costly and beautiful indeed, but of a kind that was totally unknown to it before they described when they should have felt; they reasoned when they should have suffered; they were eloquent when they should have been energetic; they were curious in words, when the audience wanted thoughts; they pleased when they should have moved; they had studied books not men; they had all the learning of the closet, but not the knowledge of the living world: their's was no quivering of the sensitive nerve; no throbbing of the sympathetic heart; the sacred fountain of tears, the hyn dakρúwv, remained tranquil and undisturbed, and Melpomene listened with surprise, but indifference, to a language she had never heard before. This tendency to an analytic minuteness of description, whether of inward feeling or external nature, is certainly found in Miss Baillie, as in her contemporaries; but then it is accompanied with excellencies of many kinds which they did not possess. None can deny her the possession of original powers; there are no plays like her's in the history of the drama; her language and verse is her own-her characters are her own-they do not resemble those of her predecessors—they have some likeness to the character of the Elizabethan plays, but they are not servile imitations; in short, with their beauties and their defects, their general vigour and their occasional greatness, their excellent parts and their defective whole, they are by right her own. In point of beauty and gracefulness of design and elegance of execution, Basil stood in her first series, to our belief, pre-eminent. There was a beautiful and poetical contrast throughout. The character of the intrepid and experienced soldier, high in military fame, bred in camps, and inured to battle, the favourite son of Bellona, held in the soft and gentle chains of female beauty; the

involuntary struggles of conscience, the stern and startling voice of Duty, the melancholy forebodings of the future, like dark and damp shadows chilling and covering the heart; the renewed flattery and smiles and encouragement of Hope; the alternations of conflicting passions; the triumph of love; and at last the terrific retribution, when the grave alone was deep enough to shield the fallen and degraded warrior from remorse and shame; all this found a powerful bond of sympathy, and delivered, as it was, in language of considerable elegance and harmony, and hung round with the choicest garlands of sentiment and expression, formed a fine specimen of dramatic art. We do not like the death of Basil; this manner of killing heroes to the ears and not to the eye, being altogether modern, and consequent on the invention of gunpowder. We think Miss Baillie rather unfortunate in her final exits, and that this one might have been more skilfully managed,

And tragical, my noble Lord, it is,
For Pyramis therein doth kill himself;

but the blemish, if it is one, does not affect the other parts.

We rank Montfort much below our favourite: there is, to our minds, a vapoury and strutting sort of mock grandeur about it. An attempt at being very gigantic and heroic, without the simple impress of real dignity; the characters are on an artificial elevation. No wonder the play was not well received; we only wonder how those, like John Kemble and his immortal sister, who were experienced in their art, should have ventured to bring it out. The unnatural hatred of Manfred, is not only disagreeable, but to the common mind must be unaccountable. The natural man, the gentleman of the gallery, -knows no such abstract and refined aversions; he requires plain intelligible motives. He does not hate men, with a fiendish and demoniac hatred, for a look, a gesture, a tone of voice, a manner—a je ne sçai quoi, that cannot be defined nor expressed. Then, this hatred was as dull as it was unaccountable. There was no advance of action, no combination of circumstance, no progression of incidents, no relief through secondary characters and events, and subsidiary circumstances; it had to us something of the savour of the German school; at any rate, this hatred was a very unfit basis for a production, which more than any other, must appeal to the general feeling, the common nature, and which does not deal with the eclectic, the scholastic, the refined. Jane Montfort is a kind of heroine in high life, with no woman's hold upon her feelings. We find no such characters in Shakspeare, where women are women. This is a sort of creation of modern society. It might have pleased Louis the Grand in the private theatre at Versailles; he would have flattered himself that Montfort had formed his grandeur of sentiment from him; but it could not succeed in the Commons.*

Of all the plays, Ethwald is the most defective in plot, and yet the one possessing, in our opinion, the greatest beauties of composition. We have now got to a nobler passion,

The last infirmity of noble minds,

one producing greater actions, and inspiring loftier sentiments. The progress of ambition in the mind of the youthful peasant is finely marked: the change and disfigurement of his once ingenuous and noble nature are boldly traced; the depths of his tempted and betrayed nature are sounded, and

* Kean played in Montfort, and produced of course some of his terrific effects; as when he appeared after the murder.

prophetic gleams and forebodings of his future destinies are not withheld. The events that succeed each other excite curiosity, and are described with force and eloquence. The details of the plot are not very original, nor are the different parts well jointed or skilfully combined; and, to use the expression of some foreign critic-" there is plenty of blood and blank verse" throughout. But the poetry is very beautiful, though the metaphors and similes and illustrating images are too elaborately drawn out. If it is, as is said, a certain sign of poetry being good, that we recur to it with pleasure, we can truly say, that often as we have read this play, we still read it again and again-decies repetita placet. How we lament that the separately beautiful limbs of this statue could not be combined and moulded into one perfect and majestic form.

The plays in these new volumes, though superior to the former in the finish and cast of execution, are, we frankly own, much inferior as productions of dramatic talent. Perhaps the passions which they delineate, are such as do not afford so noble a platform for genius to display its powers; perhaps there is a vigour and freshness in our early and youthful creations, a warmth and glow in our first poetic loves, a richness and flavour in the first fruits of fancy, which no future toil nor art can equal. Yet study and time have still produced their effects, in the greater correctness of the poetry, in the ease and variety of the versification, in the closer unity and arrangement of the plot, the connexion of the incidents, though not to say in greater originality of invention. There was in this respect much that was faulty in the earlier plays; and indeed, we consider the best work which Miss Baillie could now perform for the stability of her fame, would be carefully to revise her earlier dramas, weed out their ungraceful and offensive peculiarities of diction,-republish them, together with the present tragedies,-leave out her offerings to Thalia altogether, and we venture to say, that in her volumes would be recognized a power of dramatic talent, and a fine variety of poetic conception and expression, which had certainly not been known in any one mind, since Melpomene woke from her long and almost death-like sleep upon the grave of Otway.† Of the present plays we shall proceed to give our opinion in as brief a compass as possible.

* As in Ethwald-" Thou'st, fixéd, stretchéd, seizéd." This is very ungraceful, and contrary to the genius of the language-it is a fault pervading the play. What, Bertha is it thee (thou) who steal'st upon me.' When I could see him from the pursuit come.' In war's iron field, such honor meriting.' "Their success owehonoured indeed am I." "Under the influence of that dark wizard." "Wheeling aloft with wild dissónant screams." 'Let not your noble spirit be then shent ;' which word occurs several times. But the greatest felon of all, is the verb do, who though repeatedly banished by the assembled synod of Parnassus, always returns from transportation. It is most offensively repeated in this play. That I do feel a wild and

We

trembling pleasure' But they do press so closely on my heart'-and so on. hope all these blemishes will be erased-how they have remained so long we cannot imagine. We quote from the second edition. In Const. Paleologus- But poor in kingly állies; and,' And martial then my new gain'd strength," for marshall; and "The vile refúge and garbage of the enemy.' In Orra, p. 9, I think of wiving my lone state.' P. 26, From thee as cadets from an elder born.' In Orra there is beautiful poetry, with a wretched plot. The Beacon is a beautifully written drama throughout. The fault of the Family Legend, is its tendency to be too melodramatic. + Since the days of Otway and Rowe what have we had? Two plays by Mason; a volume by Jephson; the Revenge, by Young; and Douglas, by Home. So closes the scanty list. But in the same period, how richly cultivated is every other poetic department. The name of Thomson should be added; but in truth there is no real dramatic talent in him or in the others. It was all forced fruit, and wanted flavour.

ROMIERO.-There is a defect, we think, in the impression which the character of Zorada was intended to produce; and which arises from this circumstance that what is added to the intensity of her filial duty, seems taken from the warmth of her connubial love. The love of the wife is too much sacrificed to the duty of the daughter: besides feeling, however virtuous and good, if exercised clandestinely and with fear of discovery, loses much of its bloom and attraction. Her first reception of her husband, after his absence, is too abrupt, and her displeasure too hasty, considering that her father had previously acquainted her with the oath which Romiero had taken to his Sovereign, and that she consequently knew him to be bound by all the sacred obligations of duty, as a subject to his King. Her rejection, too, of Romiero's endearing and courtly terms, and playful tokens of affection, is harsh and unfeminine-it is not the language which Desdemona would use to Othello. In her very first address to her returned husband, she chides the fond expression of his affection, and turns her thoughts immediately on her father.

Nay, good my Lord, those words are full of fondness,
And yet they please me not. What shall I say?
Speak to me as a wife, companion, friend,

Not as a petted darling. Art thou well?

How has it fared with thee since last we parted?
My father too-what dost thou know of him?

This is rather chilling, even we think, who ourselves have been brought up in a chilly atmosphere. Again she says,

The horrid tale is true,

The King has bound him by the horrid oath

Which thou didst mention to me-base compliance!

without a single reflection on the open and satisfactory explanation which Romiero had previously given to her-that, if he had not taken the oath, his own life would have been the sacrifice, and that her father was really in safety.

Dear Love! he is in safety far from hence,

This oath, as to his life, is nugatory,

And but for it, thou ne'er hadst seen thy husband.
Thou know'st the cruel nature of Don Pedro,

Ah! why that face of sorrowful displeasure?
Alas! I see I am not welcome here!-

:

Now, as Romiero had assured her of her father's personal safety, and of the necessity which obliged him to the oath, Zorada virtually prefers her father's presence to her husband's life at least her expressions approach closely to these conclusions, or else she does not credit Romiero's assertion. Zorada's character has no attraction to us. This filial duty, which tramples down the sweetest blossoms of all other affections, in its determined and inflexible path, excites in us imperfect sympathy. The love of the wife can, perhaps, hardly be carried to such an extent as to displease; but if it falls short, it greatly offends. The only pleasing female characters are those where gentleness, fondness, and a perfectly tender and confidential love, prevail over every other quality. In modern days, it is not the severe character of the heroines of the Greek stage, of the Electra, that will delight,-it is Imogene, Juliet, Miranda; it is,

-the gentle Lady married to the Moor, And heavenly Una with her milk-white Lamb.

Again, why should Romiero never have suspected Beatrice, instead of his

8

Dramas, by Joanna Baillie.

[July,

wife-it surely was more natural. The violence of his foregone conclusions,' in his interview with Guzman, pp. 63-66, are not warranted, considering that his jealousy is not artfully and vigilantly fostered with constant surmises and solicitations, as Othello's was; but spontaneously arose, and, like that of Leontes, breaks forth in frantic violence. If this passion of jealousy was to be the agent of the drama, and it was necessary to paint it in its strongest colours,-a more skilful combination of unfortunate coincidences should have given to it a more natural existence. The scenes of Beatrice and Maurice come in with good effect to soften in some degree the unpleasing effect of the leading passion but there is an unaccountable deficiency of explanation in Zorada,—and there is a want of relief in this play, arising from the incidents not being sufficiently varied: the last act fails in interest, from want of sufficient action and circumstances. There is no character to whom the feelings and sympathy is directed. Perhaps the manner of Romiero's death is not natural-but at any rate, his stalking to the front of the stage, away from the very person whom with the whole energy of his soul he had been endeavouring to discover, at the very moment of the possession of his desires, merely to give time for Zorada to throw a veil over her father's face, is one of the clumsiest pieces of mechanical contrivance we ever met with. The little touches of description are always good and fresh: as the following lines, though they are not very dramatic:

MAURICE.

What! here alone, the ladies being retired?
On such a day as this, when the blue waves,
Heaving and sinking in the sunny gleam,
Show all the changes of their crisped sides
Like the seamed foldings of a silken robe;
When every sea-bird is upon the wing,
Skimming and diving for his finny prey;
When distant vessels, tacking to the breeze,
Seem dames whose snowy kirtles are stretched out

To the slow measure of some courtly dance:

On such a day as this, to stay at home,

In gloomy chambers pent!

HENRIQUEZ. The play is intended to illustrate the passion of Remorse; -properly speaking, a feeling of the mind consequent on the cessation of a passion criminally and fatally indulged. The very nature of it seems ill fitted for the purpose of dramatic action; for the deed is done which is the source of excitement; the action is over, with all its concomitant circumstances, its high resolves, its desperate struggles, and fatal success. Remorse soon follows the antecedentum scelestem,'-but remorse consists in fearful meditation, in the upbraidings of conscience, in miserable repentance of the guilty past, and in agonizing anticipation of the avenging future but this does not lead to action, which is the life-blood of the dramatic fable. The murder is perpetrated as the fable begins-all that follows must be of inferior interest. The spectator cannot interest himself in the gloomy reproachings of the murderer's conscience, as in the storm and conflict of those mad and tempestuous passions that hurried him to the crime. We wonder that the subject did not naturally lead to grand and melancholy soliloquies by Henriquez, in which Miss Baillie's powers would have been nobly called forth. This would have been a more natural outlet of the groaning and burthened mind, than the discourses which Henriquez holds with others. The plot has parts too much resembling those of Romiero-one person in a wood being mistaken