aided by systematic reading or thought, I am willing to allow; but why deny me all? Savage. Few have dared to do so. Perhaps you have heard those few. Malevolent critics often speak through a tube to the ear of the author alone, and no wight else heedeth them. Censure and refutation how could you escape?-you, who have spoken more wisdom, perhaps, that any one writer, and certainly with less meditation, striking out every thing from the intuitive light of the moment-every truth separate from its fellow, connected by no chain of reasoning or argument.-You that have spoken upon every subject, and liest like a huge whale upon the waters of literature-an object that no harpooning critic can either avoid or miss. You must hear, Doctor, without grumbling. Johnson. 'Tis true, Dick, I am to the present age what Hobbes was to ours; 66 upon whose steel-cap," some one observes, every puny warrior would try his sword. Savage. There were other points of resemblance between you both. Were you not a pair of incorrigible Tories? Goldsmith. Who talks of Tories? Have you not lived long enough in the other world to be sick of political cant? Do you remember, both of you walking round St. James's square the space of a live-long night, vowing, in the might of your patriotism, "to stand by the nation," and this when, to my knowledge, you had neither chair to sit on, nor bed on which to repose. Johnson. } "Stand by the nation?" ha ha! ha! Goldsmith. But, Savage, you that have been so often and so lately here on furlough, what new book is the world talking of at this blessed moment? Savage. Of the last Scotch novel, to be sure-Nigel they call it. From the lady of quality to the London 'prentice all are thumbing it. Many a boat, rowed by hand in gay livery, has been launched at its suggestion. Greenwich Park has been inundated with visitors every Sunday since its publication. The youth of the metropolis will have the author of the Common Council; and the colliers of Whitefriars are clubbing to present him with a silver pen. Johnson. Who is this said Scotchman, Sir? Savage. This unsaid Scotchman you mean, Doctor. One who knows how to be national without prejudice or illiberality. Johnson. Humph! The days were, Dick, thou durst not thus have answered me. Savage. Come, Samuel. I disappeared before the days of your dictatorship. Johnson. Let it rest. But this Scotch Dictator, whom the Londoners worship Savage. No Dictator, merely Prætor; one that giveth shows to the people. His fiats in criticism are not to be so esteemed as thine were. The worst things of Dryden have found favour in his eyes; and his panegyrics upon contemporaries are marked by too little discrimination. Goldsmith. But forty odd volumes! The Vicar was quite enough for me. Savage. He must have brought to his task an immense fund of reading and taste, with a quantum sufficit of gentlemanly feeling, not over deep, and much too fond of sticking close to probability and propriety. His pages seem often flat to minds of strong passion. Johnson. That, Sir, is an excellence. Prose should not meddle with passion. It is the province of poetry alone. Savage. The best point about the Scotch novels is, that they are a perfect manual of true gentility. They will do for England in the way of general refinement and honourable feeling, more than all the court etiquette, conventional politeness, or didactic poetry, could ever effect. I may be allowed to judge of what the want of such feelings are. Johnson. Hath this age produced any thing like Rasselas? Savage. No, Doctor; the world is tired of allegory, of visions, apologues, and all the pretty little vehicles and go-carts of morality, so much in vogue during our time. Johnson. I believe you, Sir: having no taste for the commodity itself, they can dispense with the vehicles. Savage. The present is not an immoral age, Doctor, but it is a fastidious one; and if morality as a theme displeases it, it is that our worthy contemporaries and their immediate predecessors converted it into an utter common-place. Johnson. Is it thus you speak of Addison and ****, the Spectator and the Rambler? Savage. Were the Numbers of the Spectator published now for the first time, they would be thought flat; and the ponderous verbosity of the Rambler would sink any periodical of the present day. Goldsmith. Hold, Doctor: lay down the big book, for the love of God. No quarrelling! Let us not shame the peaceful realms we came from. Savage. Bear with and pardon me, mine old friend. My late visits to earth have metamorphosed me into a genius of the present day -pert, proud, and flippant, an assertor of all things, and upholder of none. To-morrow, mayhap, I shall praise you to the skies, and condemn the dull wits that have succeeded you to the dungeons of the Dunciad. Johnson. Thou wert ever, Sir, an unprincipled vagabond. And I well believe thy assertion of typifying in thine own person the genius of the present age. I know not how it is, but long tranquillity has silenced my tongue. I have learned to think, not argue. Once I mistook them for the same. Goldsmith. But the poets, Dick-who be the poets now-a-day, with the voluminous works of whom you just bearded me? Savage. The Novelist we have just spoken of, is also a poet, a great and a voluminous one. But in truth the canvass of poetry was too confined for his pencil. Nor was his feeling deep and condensed enough for verse. His conceptions appear not to advantage when directly told the egotism of the old simple spirit of chivalry would not now be borne. It is only when developed in action, that it excites our admiration, without awakening ridicule. : Johnson. Though I know not the author, there is truth in what you advance. Had Don Quixote never opened his mouth, the world would not have taken the history of his adventures as a jest. Goldsmith. But is not the drama the proper place for developing sentiment in action? Savage. True, but novels are the drama of the day. The stage has irrecoverably fallen. Johnson. And why, Sir? Savage. A thousand different causes are imagined: a thousand different remedies assigned. Some attribute public apathy to the great events that have lately occupied the interest and attention of Europe. Others attribute it to the increasing vogue of political economy, and such dry studies. While others see the cause of all in a general want of talent a dearth of good poets and good actors. The last I contradict plumply. Johnson. And as to the other two:-were there no great events in the age of Elizabeth? Sir, was the Reformation nothing, as an object to engross public concern-the Spanish Armada too? As to what you call political economy-a name, I do not well understand, but a thing indeed which it is absurd hoping ever to see-were not tragedies written in the days of Bacon and Locke? Goldsmith. Perhaps authors do not enough consult the taste of the town. Savage. Taste of the town! Alas! the town is much changed since we knew it of old. Taste it has none, but for milling-matches and "Life in London." Johnson. What's all that, Sir? Savage. Boxing and blackguardism. Johnson. A taste for boxing may not be elegant; but it is at least manly, and undeniably antique. Milton recommends it strongly in his treatise on education. "They must be also practised," saith the veteran, "in all the locks and gripes of wrastling, wherein Englishmen were wont to excell, as need may often be in fight to tugge, to grapple, and to close." But how can pugilism interfere with the stage? Savage. Well thou knowest, Doctor, that the small, current chat of town is the life and soul of every thing within its walls, be it of amusement or importance. And you must know, that instead of going to the pit, or to Wills's, the youth now-a-days, Templars, apprentices, &c. all drive to Moulsey, or walk to the Fives Court; and the Fancy, as a general topic, has utterly superseded the stage. Johnson. Wrong, Sir, wrong, all this. Still there must be a deeper cause. Savage. If I ventured to assign one, it would be the early perfection, or rather the perfectionated rudeness, of the drama; which, whether it checks rivalry, or excites imitation, is in either case calculated to debar us from all hopes of possessing a drama suited to our advanced tastes. Johnson. But comedy, Sir. Savage. Ah! there indeed must be a palpable want of genius. Johnson. From what you say of the Scotch Novelist, he would write better comedies than tragedies. Savage. Undoubtedly; but the wise ones think otherwise. Johnson. Then the wise ones err:-Addison in the same manner remained blind to what he might do. What a noble comedy we should have possessed from the hand that drew Sir Roger de Coverley and Will Wimble? The drama should be supported by a positive tax on literary exertion it is of such great and national importance, I would condemn every penman to write either a tragedy or a comedy. The other departments of literature may be left to the support of voluntary contributions. The parties here became taciturn, and commenced fiddling with leaves and turning over volumes. I fear, we must wait (till our next number) for a renewal of the conversation. Y. ง I SHALL Write you, my dear S- two or three long letters on your favourite subject; and I shall begin by confessing to you that, since I have been here, it has become a favourite subject with me; though, as you know, (and you used to be very angry with me for it) I did not pay much attention to it when I was in Paris with you the last time, whatever I might do the first. I have, it is true, not been here long enough to enable me to form a very correct estimate of the state of dramatic amusements in this country; but, if I am very scrupulous on this point, I shall never fulfil half the promises I made on leaving home; so I must e'en venture to send you my remarks just as they arise, leaving for future opportunities any corrections and qualifications that it may be necessary to make in them. The comparative state of general refinement to which the Fine Arts of different nations have arrived, may be pretty correctly reckoned by the comparative conditions of their acted drama. Perhaps there is no other criterion of the kind so good as this. Applying this, then, to England and France, I think they may be considered as nearly on a level with each other. England is infinitely below France in many respects; but it cannot be denied that France must yield to England in many others. Of the true nature of comedy, properly so called, and of actors and authors of this class, England seems to have very little notion in the present day; and to possess no living examples at all. I speak of that gay, graceful, spirited, airy, and piquant comedy which is, or ought to be, nothing more than a refined and heightened image of polished society. M- tells me that they possess some admirable and indeed perfect examples of this kind of writing, which were produced in the witty and licentious reign of Charles II.; but that they are seldom acted now-partly from the want of an existing taste for this kind of drama; but chiefly on account of their deficiency in living actors to embody the principal characters. Mgoes so far as to assure me that several of these comedies are greatly superior to any thing of the kind possessed by us in the same department of dramatic literature: but he has not yet persuaded me of the correctness of this opinion; and I am afraid I shall not (while I am here at least) have time to judge for myself, if indeed the nature of this kind of writing will admit of a foreigner doing so at all. But this objection would apply to his opinion of the French writers, as well as to mine of the * Continued from vol. iv. page 576. VOL. IV. No. 20.-1822. V English; so that I dare say we shall each keep our own opinion after all. We both of us agree, however, that at present the English can make no pretensions whatever to the possession of that particular kind of talent here referred to, either in authors or actors; and that the French have a considerable advantage over them in this respect. Under the head of correctness of costume too, he admits, though somewhat reluctantly, that the great national theatres of England are not equal to our's. On the other hand, I am compelled to admit-what I never thought of being even called upon to do—that in real tragic talent, as it respects actors, with one splendid exception, we cannot pretend to institute a comparison between our's and those of England in the present day. Indeed on this subject an entirely new light has broken in upon me since I have been here;-exactly such a one as burst upon Rousseau when he first became acquainted with Italian music, and was led to compare it with that of France. But I shall speak of this part of the subject hereafter. In mere farce I believe neither France nor England can claim any very decided superiority over the other; for if our petites pièces surpass those of the English in spirit and light-heartedness, their's surpass our's in an equal degree in broad humour and comic exaggeration. Something of the same kind may, perhaps, be said of the actors of each country, in this department of the art: though I should be loath to admit that anything can surpass, in their various styles, Brunet, Potier, Joly, &c. &c.; and in fact nothing that they have in England does surpass these, or at all equals the two first. But they have a species of actor, who is qualified to embody and express a kind of humour, that we do not exactly possess, and should probably not much relish if we did. French travellers seem to have been mistaken in the accounts they have given of the number of English theatres. There are as many in London as there are in Paris; with this difference, that they are never all open at the same time. Besides an Italian opera on a very grand scale, and two national theatres for the representation of the regular drama, there is an English comic opera on the plan of the Feydeaua theatre where they usually play short light comic pieces, like those of the Vaudeville and the Variétés, and I believe six others of the same description as those on the Boulevards. All those that I shall have to tell you any thing of in detail will be the two regular theatres, as they are called; though they appear to be the least regular of all the others; for they exhibit, in turn, tragedy, comedy, farce, melo-drama, pantomime, horse-riding, rope-dancing, dogs, monkies, fire-works, &c. ! Indeed I am not sure that I may not say they sometimes exhibit all these on one and the same evening! This is, to be sure, in a very barbarous taste and I the more wonder at it because, when they do perform the regular drama, the costume is arranged with nearly as much propriety as it is in our own national theatres, and the scenery and decorations are even superior to our's. But before proceeding to notice that department of the English theatres which appertains to the performance and the management, let me point out to you a few of the particulars connected with the public or audience-part of them :-for this part of an English theatre, or place of public entertainment, presents more peculiar and characteristic |