infinite vapidity, lifelessness, and incapability of life, render them a dishonour equally to the authorship and the taste of our forefathers. Miss Baillie's homage to Shakspeare is professed and zealous. Yet her model was French. Conscious power is a hazardous thing she seemed to have conceived the impracticable ambition of uniting the richness, variety, and strength of the old English versification with the rigidity and singleness of the French plot: she might as wisely have attempted to combine the marble terraces, regular parterres, and statued fountains of the French garden, with the sweeping majesty of the forest, covering the mountain with its sheets of verdure, and with the cataract thundering through its shade. To aim at perpetual effect, to hate every thing but the grand, to make the casual and adventitious portion of the character the substitute for the whole nature of the man, has been the declared and the fatal error of the French stage. Its hero must be always a hero; its king must always wear the crown upon his brow; its lover must be a perpetual victim of the passion. We remember a remark illustrative of this national misconception made by the first of living French actors on Kean's Richard, where in his ominous depression before the battle he stands drawing lines in the dust with his sword. "That is not what a great General would do,” was the remark: "would the Duke of Wellington be walking before his tent with his sword making plans of the manœuvres? He would have recollected his own dignity, and been the General throughout." This is the secret principle of the system. The Frenchman's Richard would have been the General and King, and nothing more. The man would have been forgotten. The casual character of office which must so often pass away from the mind, and which the more customary use would probably render the more feeble in its impression, was in this criticism to supersede the innate and perpetual character of the man. For one hour during which a king or a General might feel himself filled with the spirit of the sceptre or the truncheon, there must be many a one when he felt only that he was a human being liable to the common impulses, anxieties, and wants of our general nature. Richard, musing on the eventfulness of the coming morning, and filled with unwonted melancholy at the caprices of fortune, differed in nothing from the nameless myriads who have like him stood in sight of ruin. In that mood he was neither king nor leader; but a man, and a weak and weary minded one. The Frenchman would have seated him in his council of war, dazzling in perpetual panoply, issuing ceaseless despatches and commands, strained, stately, and regal to the moment when he was struck from throne and life together. But Shakspeare knew what was in the heart of man, and the actor deserved the high praise of comprehending Shakspeare. In the British drama there is no deficiency more fatal than that of what is technically called " business." Of this there is an actual plenitude in all the real transactions of courts, and that influential and lofty region of society in which great catastrophes are generated. If we are not habitually let into the secrets of the whole operation, we are at least taught that a variety of agencies and impulses must have been combined before the roar and combustion of the elements burst or blaze upon us. But the continued and increasing curiosity essential to the triumph of the drama can be kept up only by a continued and rapid succession of events, growing in magnitude as they advance, and flashing new lights upon each other, up to the moment of general and consummate illustration, It is remarkable how unconscious Miss Baillie seems to have been of this pre-eminent necessity. With a powerful imagination, and with an obvious knowledge of human nature, she yet carries on her plot by some disjointed, improbable, and tardy series of events: the drama languishes in the midst of its rich and many-coloured declamation, and the characters seem condemned to die, like fine gentlemen, of having nothing to do. Another hazardous disqualification is to be found in the nature of her style. Her verse has great force and beauty; yet it may have these, and not be fit for the peculiar enunciation of the stage. Brevity, not amplitude; intensity, not pomp; clearness, not laborious turbidness, are the true requisites for that poetry which is to be felt in even the stormy action of the stage, and the hurried utterance of the actor. Of this versification, tragedy, from the days of Dryden, exhibits scarcely an example. Dryness and debility, stately monotony, and rigid measure, all the characteristics of the foreign school, divested of its polished elegance and critical accuracy, formed the evil distinctions of our stage poetry. A better taste has followed, and the elder dramatists are at length the acknowledged authorities on versification; but the modern specimens are too few, and too little known, to allow of our assuming the praise of a genuine reform in the noble language of tragedy. The result of these remarks is, that Miss Baillie misnamed her plays when she gave them the title of tragedies. They are tragic poems, incapable of being transferred to the stage, (as the fate of one of the most theatric among them may have already convinced her,) but, in their proper class, exhibiting a combination of natural vigour and cultivated taste, of lofty conception and rythmical beauty, altogether unequalled among the female writers of England. A prominent feature in her early works, and one most honourable to her heart and understanding, was a strong sense of piety. It sometimes marred the poetic prowess of her genius, and enfeebled the colouring that was to make the warrior or the statesman start from the canvass; but it consecrated the work, and to its dignity added virtue. Miss Baillie has at length produced a dramatic poem in which religion is the paramount principle; religion, scarcely as a form of belief, and still less as the common pretext for the prejudices, violences, and ambitions of sects or sovereigns, but, in its highest state, as grown from a principle into an affection, an exalted, adoring devotion, and thus entitled to be regarded as the greatest and noblest emotion of the heart.' We may well leave to her own eloquence the description of the Martyr.' Some The Martyr, whom I have endeavoured to pourtray, is of a class which I believe to have been very rare, except in the first ages of Christianity. There have been many martyrs in the world. have sacrificed their lives for the cause of reformation in the church, with the zeal and benevolence of patriotism: some for the maintenance of its ancient doctrines and rites, with the courage of soldiers in the breach of their beleaguered city: some for intricate points of doctrine, with the fire of controvertists, and the honour of men who disdained to compromise what they believed to be the truth, or under impressions of conscience which they durst not disobey; but, from the pure devoted love of God, as the great Creator and benevolent Parent of men, few have suffered but when Christianity was in its simplest and most perfect state, and more immediately contrasted with the mean, cheerless conceptions and popular fables of Paganism. We may well imagine that, compared to the heathen deities, those partial patrons of nations and individuals, at discord amongst themselves, and invested with the passions and frailties of men, the great and only God, Father of all mankind, as revealed in the Christian faith, must have been an idea most elevating, delightful, and consonant to every thing noble and generous in the human understanding or heart. Even to those who, from the opinions of their greatest philosophers, had soared above vulgar belief to one universal God, removed in his greatness from all care or concern for his creatures, the character of the Almighty God and beneficent parent joined, who cares for the meanest of his works, must have been most animating and sublime, supposing them to be at the same time unwarped by the toils and pride of learning.'- pp. v. vi. After some striking remarks on the sources of the Pagan persecution, and the invincible fortitude of the early Christians, among whom were many of the Roman soldiery, she assigns her reasons for making a soldier the hero of her work. They are rather fantastic, but their language ought to preserve them. It was indeed natural that the invincible fortitude of those holy sufferers, fronting death with such noble intrepidity, should attract the admiration and sympathy of the generous and brave, whose pride it was to meet death undauntedly in a less terrific form; and we may easily imagine also, that a generous and elevated mind, under the immediate pressure of such odious tyranny as some of the Roman emperors exercised on their senators and courtiers, would turn from this humiliating bondage to that promise of a Father's house in which there are many mansions, and turn to it with most longing and earnest aspirations. The brave man, bred in the camp and the field, encompassed with hardships and dangers, would be little encumbered with Jearning or philosophy, therefore more open to conviction; and when returned from the scenes of his distant warfare, would more indignantly submit to the capricious will of a voluptuous master. These considerations have led me to the choice of my hero, and have warranted me in representing him as a noble Roman soldier: one whose mind is filled with adoring awe and admiration of the sublime, but parental character of the Deity, which is for the first time unfolded to him by the early teachers of Christianity; one whose heart is attracted by the beautiful purity, refinement, and benignant tenderness, and by the ineffable generosity of him who visited earth as his commissioned Son, -attracted powerfully, with that ardour of affectionate admiration which binds a devoted follower to his glorious chief.'-pp. xi. xii. The scene opens with a dialogue between Sulpicius, a senator, and Orceres, a Parthian prince residing at Rome. The latter (a singular love-messenger) is commissioned to communicate to Cordenius Maro, an officer of the Imperial Guard, the Senator's choice of him as a son-in-law. Art thou so well convinced He loves my little damsel? She is fair, But seems to me too simple, gay, and thoughtless, To all my wealth, had I suspected sooner, p. 4. The Parthian assigns public duty at some of the martyrdoms as the cause of the lover's absence; and to the Senator's observation * There's sorcery in it, or some stronger power. But in an alter'd voice; with breath restrain'd, Like those who speak at midnight near the dead. So stationed, who could speak to him of pleasure? p. 5. Portia, the daughter of Sulpicius, now enters, bringing or dragging after her, as the author hardily phrases it, her Numidian page, whom she orders to sing the following song, a secret tribute to her lover. We give this as Miss Baillie's latest lyric. The storm is gathering far and wide, Power on earth, and power in air, Brace thee bravely for the fight. And so, indeed, thou tak'st thy stand, p. 7. He has been deeply Cordenius at length comes on the scene. moved by the constancy of the martyrs, at whose deaths he has been present. There is some power in this, or good or ill, It cannot be! There is some power in this Mocking all thought-incomprehensible. [Remains for a moment silent and thoughtful, while Sylvius enters behind him unperceived. Delusion! ay, 'tis said the cheated sight Will see unreal things; the cheated ear List to sweet sounds that are not; even the reason Maintain conclusions wild and inconsistent. We hear of this: the weak may be deluded; pp. 16, 17. In this dubiousness he is found by Sylvius, a centurion and a Christian convert, who, after a brief exposition of his principles, invites Cordenius to one of the secret meetings of the brethren. At fall of eve, I'll meet thee in the suburb, |