produce a scenic effect at the suicidal cost of destroying the audience's interest in his hero.

The petty spite of Mordaunt (whom Mr. Marston makes a sort of Byron and Canning together) becomes perfectly ludicrous. Would the commonest Titmarsh in creation, merely to resent the rejection of his offer for a lady of rank's hand, descend to the meanness, by his perseverance of overcoming the haughty father's objection, and then at the very altar, rejecting the lady, to soothe his wounded "l'amour propre." A clever low born demagogue, who adds the somewhat anomalous accomplishment of writing verses, manages to get into Parliament; here he makes an eloquent speech which elevates him into a temporary position of importance. The minister invites him to stay during a parliamentary recess at his country seat, a sort of sop to the mushroom politician patriot, who from the dramatist's account seems to be the victim of conceit and inflated arrogance. Here he becomes enamored of the Earl's daughter, who pretty unmistakeably evidences to the parvanu that she returns his affection. Surely in a man of any mind or heart this would have created a feeling of gratitude and unselfish love. He proposes for the lady's hand, and is very naturally rejected by the father of the lady. The magnanimous gallant vows vengeance, and devotes all his energies to become a very great man, which by the way is no very difficult thing to accomplish in a second rate play an inferior dramatist is always detected by this sort of writing; like a harlequin, he has the faculty of changing a commonplace fellow into a hero, by the mere touch of his pen ;—but this "hey presto" kind of proceeding is fatal to all dramatic excellence, and proclaims indeed the fact that the author is not, and never will be, a dramatist. Mordaunt having become Premier, renews his offer for the lady's hand, and is accepted. The day of their nuptials is appointed; all are met to celebrate the ceremony, when the bridegroom elect gets up, and makes a speech, ending all by rejecting the

lady in the sight of all, and thus immolates his victim on the shrine of his own absurd wounded vanity.

He does this under the ridiculous idea that he is vindicating the insulted dignity of man, saying

"For when convention dares to tread down man,

Man shall arise in turn and tread down it,"

by no means "a palpable hit!" The magnanimous hero having thus insulted and degraded the woman he ought to have delighted to honor, rushes out, and the act ends.

The play concludes by the lady putting herself into a galloping consumption, and thinking to save her life the broken-hearted aristocratical father humbles himself so far as to go to the house of the magnanimous hero, and beg him to marry his daughter, as a sort of last resort of physic and last hope of the doctors: as Mordaunt is about to promise he will be the dose of ipecacuanha in order to cure the lady, the patient herself rushes in, and after some highly absurd dialogue, dies in Mordaunt's arms, who forthwith calls himself a brute; the only bit of truth and common sense he utters in the whole play, but which the audience have been saying for him all the time; and falling at the old Earl's feet, says, “Father,” whereupon the Earl says, "My son," and the curtain falls.

We should have passed this play over altogether had it not been performed both in England and America with some applause by the unthinking mob. Mr. Marston evidently thinks that a startling absurdity is a striking effect, consequently, his heroes are invariably stage-struck cockneys; asort of cross breed, between the milliner and costermonger, combining the spurious shabby gentility of the one animal, with the brutality of the other. What can show more of the man-milliner than Mordaunt's conduct before he made the offer of marriage to Mabel's father; and what more of the costermonger than his behavior after his refusal. We cannot forbear

involuntarily exclaiming, give us Shakspere and Bowery b'hoyism in preference to Marston and the Fifth Avenue. Or to put it into its simplest elements, let us have human nature before codfish aristocracy. God makes the one, but tailors and milliners the other. It will be seen that this play consists of three situations; namely, the refusal of Mordaunt's first offer; his rejection of the lady in his turn; and, thirdly, Mabel rushing into her lover's house to die. Let us realize this absurdity by inquiring for an instant into the possibility of an English aristocrat forgetting, not alone conventional dignity, but human nature, so far as to implore a man who had so grossly insulted his daughter;-and fancy Mabel, so forgetful of female propriety as to rush to this man's house, merely to have the pleasure of dying in his best drawing-room. But, enough of this: Mr. Marston's best performance is undoubtedly his dramatic poem Gerald," for, although even here the sentiment is sickly, there are many sweet passages, not enough, certainly, to prove the poet, but sufficient to demonstrate the elegant versifier. There is a certain family resemblance between Mordaunt and Gerald; both young men of plebeian extraction, with a decided tendency to versifying; both dissatisfied with their position in life; they alike pine for the countenance and society of men of rank; unerring signs of an inferior nature; and both are exposed to the insolence of the class they wish to force themselves upon.

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Mr. Marston's last play of "Strathmore" is free from this objection; but the construction of the plot is very involved, and the most effective scene in the play is copied from Racine; even to the very word "die," which forms the climax of the effect. In all these plays there is a total want of that truthfulness and simplicity which appeals to the human heart, and receives the heart's response. The dialogues of most modern plays are composed of talking at each other, a rhetorical display; and not an interchange of antagonism,— a striving of two discordant natures for a mastery, the solution of

which is the dramatic result. This is our idea of tragic dialogue. Comedy, of course, depends on an elegant fencing, an interchange of thrusts and parries, a brilliant combat of wits; not a deliberate hacking of one party at the other for a certain number of lines, and then a standing still for the other to have his "hack away" in return.

It is unpleasant to be compelled to speak so unfavorably of men of talent and cultivated taste; but so long as we confound these with men of genius, so long will the judgment of the many be of a low standard. The mind must not be educated into a false mediocrity, or the world will soon become a mob of mental dwarfs. Besides, it is the height of injustice to the man of real genius, and of still greater to those who pin their faith to a book.

The false prophets of literature must be driven from the temple ere true religion can be preached to the multitude. Our space forbids our carrying out this subject to the extent we should wish, we must therefore return to Mr. Marston, and say a few words on the man.

In 1842 Mr. Marston married a lady considerably older than himself, but clothed in the magical garment of "a small property." They live in Camden Town, near London, and are much attached to each other.

Their acquaintance was the result of a correspondence on literary matters; very dangerous weapons in a young lady's hands. In person Mr. Marston is tall and slenderly made, with an inclination to stoop; he has a slight impediment in his speech, and altogether gives little outward evidence of the author. His manners are amiable. Like Tennyson, he is an inveterate smoker.

We shall conclude this chapter with a few remarks on George Stephens. Few men have spent so much labor and gold in the pursuit of dramatic fame as the author of "Martinuzzi," and very few have received less in return. Of undoubted genius, he has yet

missed the crown, and we take upon ourselves to say, his own irritable impatience has been his chief opponent. The public are very much like children in the matter of fame: if you are constantly stretching forth your hands for it, they will find a curious half spiteful pleasure in putting away the previously offered wreath, while if you sit down in a state of perfect indifference, the chances are they will come and crown you.

Mr. Stephens' latest productions are, we think, the best; we allude to "Dramas for the Stage." The title is eminently typical of their chief defect; they are too evidently written for stage effect; they seem made for the actors, and not the actors for them; all is sketchy: it seems as though the dramatist had been determined to abolish the impertinence of poetry, and present his idea to the reader in its boldest possible shape: the flesh is hewed off with an unsparing hand, and a distorted skeleton is given instead of a slenderer frame when the diminishing process is employed the language ought to be pared away by fine degrees to a graceful symmetry, and not all the flesh taken from one part and all left on another. But this comes of an author foolishly believing in the wisdom of a manager, or the candor of a critic; it would be as safe to believe the purity of a courtesan, or the liberality of a publisher. All these questions depend more on the self-interest of the man than on the principle; self-interest is so fatal a blinder to the mental and moral vision, as to destroy all reliance on its credibility.

The first tragedy in the volume, entitled "Nero;" acting upon an opinion current with many that all the Cæsars were madmen, more or less, he makes the climax of their insanity come to a point in Nero, the self-conscious madman. This is a fine conception, and it is finely worked out. Nero ponders on his conscious insanity thus:

"Thus I one moment from the troubled tide

Of my mysterious soul draw up strange truth;

The next, who knows what deed the gleaming eyes