the novel personified abstractions of Discord and Policy to make up a machinery, selon les règles. We have at least a dozen better epics: and if we had only Glover's Leonidas, we might smile at the epic pretensions of France. It is his theatre that a Frenchman has to set against the Epic Helicon of England. He has nothing else to produce against the works of Milton and Shakspeare united: a fearful odds!-The plays of the French, in fact, are their epic poems. They are not properly plays: they are oratorical and narrative pieces; or, in a word, what is understood by dramatic poems: he who does not understand the difference between a dramatic poem and an absolute drama, may be assured he has no sensibility to dramatic imitation. The French dramatists do not imitate; they describe. They seem to consider that the "dignity of illustrious names and the greatness of their interests," which Corneille supposes to account for the success of his tragedy of Sertorius, is the all in all of tragedy: and that if Mithridates, King of Pontus, walk in upon the stage with a forest of feathers, half the business is done. The object is to represent an action; to relate a story; and to say fine things in fine verses. They think only of putting Livy or Justin into scenes: their characters figure as characters only, that is, as historic personages: we know no more of them than we did before: their medals would give us quite as minute an insight into the real persons, as their speeches. We hear them announce political maxims, and we see into their state intrigues: above all, we see them make love in a very courtly and ingenious manner; but they all reason, and declaim, and make love alike: certain commonplace axioms and generalities are all that we can get from them. In Shakspeare, the persons of the drama are distinguishable one from another, in nothing more than in the difference of their diction. Not merely the sentiments of Richard III. and of Macbeth differ, but their diction is different. When Henry VI. soliloquizes in Shakspeare, we know something more of him than as Henry VI: but in the French historic heroes we have no general reflections, no incidental thoughts, nothing that does not bear

at once upon the main business and help to carry the story forward: all is therefore out of nature; for even in a great design the mind flies to common objects and indifferent topics, and relaxes the fatiguing bent. of intense purpose. This Shakspeare well understood and exemplified; and this the French dramatists never understood at all, and could not exemplify. When Hotspur describes the foppish lord who demanded his prisoners, we have more than the fuct: we see into the manners and temper of the speaker; the splenetic mind and sarcastic spirit of an individual man; not a mere public character in history. So when he impatiently asks if his horse is brought to the door, and if it is "a cropeared roan?" this is like the circumstantial traits we meet with in books of memoirs; and the trifling of Lady Percy helps on the same illusion of real life; while the contrast between the female softness and prettiness, and the spleenful abstrac-tion of the really perhaps affectionate, but outwardly rough, soldier, is in itself picturesque and essentially poetical. How much better is this than a pompous description of a warhorse, which would equally suit every hero that ever backed a charger, and a page and a half of prosing sentimental common-place! The condemnation of the French stage, (not as a mirror of human passions, for to that it has no pretensions) but as a picture of history, is at once pronounced in the fact, that Crébillou found it necessary to make Catiline in love, and oblige him to stab himself at his mistress's feet.

They who have hastily given credit to the statements of French critics, will be struck with some surprise at the total dearth of invention which pervades their best productions. Their want of originality seems in a ratio to the overweening conceit of their own importance. “Il ne s'agit que de rendre Electre tout à fait a plaindre: et je crois y avoir mieux réussi que Sophocle, Euripide, Eschyle, et tous ceux qui ont traité le même sujet." So says Crébillon: and this is the way with them all. He has managed this business of making Electra an object of pity (as if Euripides had not done so) by making her in love. Thus we have

the ruling interest of the play, and the unity of character (yet the French talk of unities!) broken and confounded. Racine has played exactly the same trick with the chaste and austere Hippolitus; and Nahum Tate, stimulated by this example, -laid violent hold on Edgar and Cordelia, and insisted that, if he condescended to restore that obsolete old poet to the stage, they must both absolutely forget their respective fathers and fall in love. Voltaire admits, that the Greeks knew their business better in this instance; but he pretends, that the French have other beauties. He does not tell us, that some of their chief beauties have been pilfered from the Greeks. As for instance, the exclamation of Phædra, on which every Frenchman is so eloquent; "c'est toi qui l'as nommé."

Ιππόλυτον αὐδᾷς; σοῦ τάδ ̓ οὐκ ἐμοῦ κλύεις.

Say'st thou Hippolitus ?

Thou speak'st, not I. Racine would have borrowed, if he dared, the love-sick delirium of į, į, Πῶς ἂν δροσερᾶς, &c.

Phædra:

Of spray-fresh fount, and lay me down to rest In the green meadow, under alder-trees!

This is diluted into

Dieu! que ne suis-je assise à l'ombre des forêts!

It is wonderful how coy their poets are of any painting from nature. Claude, and Poussin, and Salvator Rosa might have studied from Shakspeare; yet he never lost himself in the merely descriptive poet. Where is there anything in the whole French drama like the care of Philoctetes? Where is there anything in passion and in imagery like his sublime farewell to the waves of the ocean, that burst in upon his solitude and sprinkle his forehead with their spray? They have absolutely nothing: they could have nothing like it: we have the Tempest and Cymbeline. We might search through their plays in vain for any passage fresh with rural imagery. Equally hopeless would be the scrutiny after passages of meditative wisdom; reveries and self

questionings, that turn the heart back upon itself, and enlarge the boundaries of the science of mental philosophy. We meet with none of those profound sentiments which are laid up in the memory, and which pass into moral apothegms, and are stored up with the aphoristical wisdom of a nation. Yet how common are these in the Greek tragedies! How common in the dramatic histories of Shakspeare !— What, and where then, are the beauties which the French dramatists possess independent of the Grecian? They have contrived, forsooth, to surpass the Greeks in the unity of time! At Athens, be it acknowledged, the spectators were required to believe, that while the chorus sang an ode, Theseus had marched on an expedition, fought a battle, sacked a town, and was now come back at the head of his victorious army. Have they no other beauties? Oh yes, hear Voltaire. They consist in " a clashing of passions, a con➡ flict of opposite sentiments, spirited speeches of enemies and rivals, quarrels, threats, mutual complaints, interesting disputes, where everything is said that should be said, situations well managed and brought about: all this, he tells us, "would have amazed the Greeks." I have no doubt of it: it amazes us at least.

Voltaire, in his wish to vilify Shakspeare, by whom he was puzzled and enraged, belies him by asserting that Hamlet is made to sing drinking-songs with his uncle at table: but under Shakspeare, whom he both blasphemes and admires, "his genius is rebuked:" and his taste, in which he excelled both Racine and Crebillon, compelled him, in spite of his prejudices and his envy, to do homage to the sublimity of Hamlet's ghost. He might have recognized here, and in the witches of Macbeth, a genius resembling that which produced the chorus of Furies and the ghost of Clytemnestra: and it might have occurred to him, that among his own countrymen he might find translations from the Greek dramatists, but no parallels; not a single tragic production, at once indepen dent of the Greeks, and congenial in power of conception. Shakspeare did not steal their cloaths; but he combined in his single person many

traits of mind and fancy common to the three great masters. If the Greeks have Orestes, we have HAMLET: if they have Hecuba, we have CoNSTANCE: if they have Clytemnestra, we have LADY MACBETH: if they have Iphigenia, we have CORDELIA; if they have Alcestis, we have IмoGEN: if they have Edipus, we have OTHELLO.

To return from this digression: the experiments made with the standard rhymed couplet, by breaking it into continuously intermingled periods, like blank verse, or simply by distending it into recurrent triplets and alexandrines, (the starch and fastidious proscription of which, by some of our critics, has crippled the decasyllabic couplet, even in the little liberty which it had), these several revolutions and restorations in its structure seem to argue a consciousness of its inadequacy to subjects requiring compass and variety of measure. It appears, therefore, to be matter of reasonable regret, that the long metre, which had been dignified by the example of some of our most celebrated old poets, should have fallen into disuse. Many reasons offer themselves why they should be revived

for occasional purposes, in preference to neglecting the resources of our native language and poetry, and attempting to ingraft upon it an uncongenial and anomalous system of harmony. These measures are vener able from illustrious precedent and from antiquity: they are in themselves magnificent and comprehensive: they are indigenous in the language: they have been recently, on some occasions, applied, with complete success, to the naturalization of the ancient warlike, and romantic ballads of Spain. In fact, in their revived use, they possess an advan tage which did not belong to their original structure. Their resolution into alternate lyric numbers attaches to them, by association, a certain lyrical quality, when re-cast in their primitive form: at the same time that the plenitude of the rhythm, resulting from the extended line, invests them with an heroical character. This combination seems to point them out. as a well adapted medium for those mythical subjects which are treated of in the hymns of classical antiquity: how far the principle may be well grounded, I hope to enable your readers to judge in my next paper.

AN IDLER.

THE Abáte Minichino, who played so considerable a part in the late Revolution of Naples, is a native of Nola, a large town about fourteen miles from Naples. He was deeply engaged with the patriots in 1799, in consequence of which he was banished. During his exile, he resided chiefly in France; he, however, visited England, and remained some time in London; and, as his family was very poor, he suffered all the miseries attendant upon extreme poverty, but at length, he contrived to obtain a decent subsistence by giving lessons in the Italian language. When the French government was firmly established in the kingdom of Naples, Minichino was no longer compelled to remain in exile, and he returned to his country in 1807. In the autumn of 1819, we were at Nola, on a visit at the house of a Neapolitan gentleman, and during our stay, we went one day to dine with a com

pany, of which Minichino was one: of course, we had not the smallest idea of the important rôle he was about to play, but we were much struck by the strangeness of his appearance, and the striking peculiarity of his manner. He was worse dressed than the generality of Neapolitan priests; his figure was tall and gaunt; and his meagre and yellow face, drawn into innumerable wrinkles, declared him about sixty years of age. He wore a pair of brass spectacles, through which glimmered his dark grey eyes, and his wide mouth was continually puckering up, or quivering. After dinner, he entered into conversation with us; his voice was harsh, and his way of speaking hurried and ungraceful: he said nothing that could attract particular observation; we remember he talked about Pope's Essay on Man, (Il saggio del Pope,) expressed a great admiration of England,

and its political institutions, and said the English women were very pretty.

It is something curious in Neapolitan history, that priests have been engaged, either as projectors, or active promoters, in almost all the revolutions which have taken place in that country in the dark ages, the clergy as a body possessed a decisive influence, not only in Naples, but in all the states of Europe, and held a casting voice in the politics of earth; and indeed, according to their own account, and if the expression be not irreverent, in the politics of heaven also: we shall not go back to so distant a period, but will mention a few instances of individuals, and of attempts, not, we hope, so remote as to be uninteresting.

In 1600, during the government of the Spanish Viceroy, the Count of Lemas,-a Dominican friar, the celebrated Tommaso Campanella, was known as one of the earliest and most redoubtable enemies to the Peripatetics, against whose doctrines he wrote many volumes, as being the friend of the reformer Giordano Bruno, (a native of Nola, who, less fortunate than Campanella, paid the forfeit of his opinions in the flames, at Rome.) Campanella was a man of great knowledge, and great fervour: he projected a plan for a revolution in Calabria, the object of which was to overthrow the government existing at that time, and to establish a republic of his own invention. He had been liberated from the inquisition at Rome, in 1597, and had been ever afterwards confined in a little monastery at Stilo, in Calabria, his native place: there he began his machinations, by giving out that from the aspect of the planets, which he perfectly understood, he had discovered that great events were about to be ushered into the world, and that a very important crisis was at hand. His first proselytes or adherents were the monks of his own society; they were soon joined by Religieux of other societies, and of other orders, who spreading themselves about, affirmed, both in the pulpit and in private, that Campanella possessed powers superior to ordinary mortals; in fact, that he was a sort of Messiah,

come to deliver them from the usurpation of the Spaniards, and to give

them liberty and happiness. An immense number of partisans was soon i gained, and not a few barons and prelates favoured the enterprize in secret. Campanella's most valuable coadjutor was Dionisio Ponzio, also a Dominican friar, a man of great eloquence and courage. Their operations were carried on for some time with prudence and profound secresy: their plan was to arm a certain force, to obtain possession of the fortresses, and to invite the Turks, (who were continual visitors on the coasts of southern Italy,) to assist them in driving out the Spaniards. Every thing was settled: the Turks agreed to land an armament in the month of September, when the revolution was to be declared, and its partisans to proceed to action. A secret, pregnant with danger and confided to many, must, in the common course of human affairs, be confided to some whom no oaths, nor prospect of contingent advantage can bind; in effect, two of the conspirators revealed every thing to the government, which instantly dispatched a general with authority and ample means to crush the plot and destroy its conductors. The general began by imprisoning. some of the conspirators, and putting others to the torture, in order to obtain a full confession, and to ascertain the extent of the conspiracy and the persons concerned in it. This was done in great secresy, and one after another silently disappeared; but the conspirators soon unraveled the mystery, and consequently, Campanella Ponzio, and others who were most deeply implicated, took to flight; they were, however, nearly all taken. Campanella was arrested on the coast, disguised as a sailor, and Ponzio was seized at Monopoli, a maritime town in Apulia, just as he was upon the point of embarking.

Eight or ten of the conspirators were put to death, to serve as examples, and many of the monks were horribly tortured: Ponzio, in the midst of the most dreadful torments which ingenuity sharpened by malice could invent, remained undaunted, and resolutely refused to utter a word. Campanella, less firm, but more ingenious, made such a strange and puzzling deposition, and behaved in such a distracted manner, as to convince every one that he was insane,