two masters of the lyre having been more followed than the rest, not only by the servile herd of imita tors, but by many men of real talent, who had strength and stock enough of their own to have come out in their original characters, and spoken in their own language. The consequence has been just as it ought to be there is not one copyist of either Sir Walter Scott or Lord Byron who is popular at this hour; and it may be safely foretold, that not one production resembling theirs, which is not theirs, will last thirty years. There is a small but peculiar class of versifiers, which deserves a word of notice here, if it be but a word of reprobation. The leaders of this select band of poetasters are men of some fancy, a little learning, iess taste, and almost no feeling. They have invented a manner of writing and thinking frigidly artificial, while affecting to be negligently natural, though no more resembling nature than the flowers represented in shell-work on lackered grounds, and framed in glass cases by our grandmothers, resembled the roses and carnations which they caricatured. They think, if they think at all, like people of the nineteenth century (for certainly nobody ever thought like them before), but they write in the verbiage of the sixteenth, and then imagine that they rival the poets of Elizabeth's reign, because they mimic all that is obsolete in them, which in fact is only preserved in Spenser and Shakspeare themselves, because it is inseparably united with what can never become obsolete,thoughts that breathe and words that burn," not less intelligible at this day than when they were first uttered. It might be shown that the finest passages in our ancient writers are those in which the phraseology has never become antiquated, nor ever can be so till the English shall be a dead language. This school must pass away with the present generation, as surely as did the Della Cruscan of the last century.

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The Drama.

Is it not remarkable, while we are rich beyond precedent in every other species of elegant literature, that in the drama we should be poor even to pauperism, if that term in its technical and degrading sense may be so applied? Not a tragedy that can live on the stage, its own element, beyond the date of a nine days' wonder, has been produced for many years. The phantasmagoria of the Castle Spectre, the magnificent but anomalous Pizarro, the crazy Bertram, are not exceptions, unless they can be shown to be legitimate tragedies, which, by the power of mind over mind alone, obtained not a temporary, but a permanent triumph,—a triumph that must be renewed as often as they are performed. The Stranger, immoral and insidious as it is, long maintained its ground by the aid of consummate acting in its most exceptionable character; but it must be acknowledged by its warmest admirers that the catastrophe is achieved by a coup de main, a trick of pantomime at last, which amounts to a silent confession of failure, that after all the cunning and elaborate preparation to secure success to the interview, the hero and heroine, like Harlequin and Columbine, could only be reconciled in dumb-show! The Gordian knot of the delicate dilemma is cut, not disenJangled; and the imagination of the most enraptured spectator dare not dwell for five minutes behind the curtain after it has fallen upon the scene. The first word uttered by either party there would dissolve the enchantment at once: Mrs. Haller must be Mrs. Haller still, and the Stranger a Stranger for ever. Yet when I name Miss Joanna Baillie, Miss Mitford, Lord Byron, Milman, Sotheby, Sheridan Knowles, and leave my audience to recollect other able writers of tragedy, among our contemporaries there is evidently no lack of great talent for this species of com

position, that may delight in the closet, however the taste of play-goers may have degenerated so as to disrelish any thing either highly intellectual or highly poetic on the stage.

It is vain to say that many pieces bearing the name of tragedies have been brought out which deserved a better fate than they experienced; for whatever may have been the cause of their miscarriage, the fact, the fatal fact remains, that this age has scarcely produced a tragedy which can keep its hold as a tragedy in representation; and short of this, whatever be the merits of some of the prematurely slain, they were only dialogues in blank verse. Desert is nothing in such a case, except it can enforce its claim; unless an audience cannot help being pleased, it is idle to argue upon the duty of their being so. homage exacted by genius is that which cannot be withheld, although it is voluntarily paid. It would seem as if the age of tragedy, as well as that of epic poetry, were gone for ever; both belong to a period of less refinement in the progress of modern society than the present. This is not the place to attempt a solution of the paradox.

The

But comedy,-gay, polite, high-spirited comedy, might have been expected to be carried to perfection amid the vicissitudes of the last thirty years, when the energies of men in every rank of life being stimulated beyond example by the great events continually occurring at home and abroad, boundless diversity of character and pursuits must have been ever at hand to furnish materials for scenic exposure; while the popular mind, incessantly craving for keener excitement, would eagerly have seized upon any novelty in the form of dramatic entertainment. Every novelty, except such as genius alone could bring forth, has been presented on the stage, and accepted with avidity by the frequenters of the theatre; but no offspring of intellect and taste, at all comparable to the numberless progeny of the same in every other depart

ment of literature, has appeared to redeem the credit of the drama from the disrepute into which it has fallen, since Sheridan gave to the world his few but inimitable comedies. These, after surpassing all that went before, seem to have left no hope for any that might follow them. This critique on the present state of the drama in England, refers to it solely as one class of literature, and bears no reference to the questionable morality of theatrical performances

Novels and Romances.

In what are properly called novels, fictitious narratives of common life, the period between Pope and Cowper was more prolific than any preceding one. Indeed, the genuine novel was yet a novelty, which originated, or rather was introduced, in the merry reign of Charles II., but never had been carried to its height of humour and reality till Fielding, Smollett, and Richardson, each in his peculiar and unrivalled way, displayed its utmost capabilities of painting men and manners as they are.

These were followed by "numbers without number," and without name, that peopled the shelves of the circulating libraries with the motley progeny of their brain. But from the time of the irruption of Southey and his irregulars into the region of Parnassus, where all had been torpor and formality before, with the exception of the little domain of Cowper, poetry rose so rapidly into fashion as to share the patronage of sentimentalists and other idle readers, till the Lady of the Lake and Childe Harold bore away the palm of popularity from the most renowned of their contemporaries-the ladies and gentlemen that live in novels, and nowhere else. There was indeed a long and desperate resistance made on the part of the novelists against the poets, and their indigenous resources failing, they called in to their aid, not German tales only, but-to confound

the enemy with their own weapons-German tragedies and German epics, of such portentous size and character as to excite astonishment, which many of those who felt it mistook for admiration, but which ceased even to be astonishment with the most stupid, when the inebriating effects of the first draught of the Teutonic Helicon had gone off, and left the reader in his right mind. Few of these exotics have been naturalized among us, except the Oberon of Mr. Sotheby, which leaves no room for regret to those who cannot read the exquisitely fine and fanciful original; and some of the best dramatic works of Schiller and Goëthe.

It has been already intimated, that one of the greatest of living poets had embarked his wealthy capital of thought, and inexhaustible stores of memory, into a more profitable channel of literary commerce. I alluded to Sir Walter Scott, as the author of "the Waverley Novels," as they are now significantly called, "the Great Unknown" having disappeared in the person of "the Mighty Minstrel of the North," as the worthy baronet had been previously called in his character of poet. These, as the productions of one mind, exuberant beyond example in this cold climate, are undoubtedly the most extraordinary works of the age; and it might perhaps be added, the most faulty that in any age have exercised despotic dominion over readers of every kind, in such various ways, and for so long a time. A higher tribute cannot be paid to the sovereignty of genius than is implied in this censure; for what must that excellence be which can afford such a foil, or endure such a drawback! It is no small merit in these to have so quickened the cloyed appetites of circulating-library readers for purer entertainment, that the dulness, froth, and sentimentality which were previously the staple-ware of Leadenhall-street, and other wholesale manufactories of novels for the spring and fall fashions, are no longer tolerable,