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finest points without departing from the resemblance of the model. Perfection does not destroy truth. Racine, in all the refinement of his art, is more natural than Shakspeare, just as the Apollo, in all his divinity, is more human in his form than an Egyptian colossus.

The privilege which a writer may take of saying and representing every thing, the bustle of the scene, and the multitude of characters, may produce an imposing effect; but after all there is little merit in it. Nothing is easier than to amuse and to excite interest by a tale; in this respect a child may possess as much skill as the ablest writer of fiction. Would it not have been easy for Racine to reduce to action those incidents which his good taste induced him to leave to description? Racine has retrenched from his tragedies all that writers of ordinary genius would have thrown into them. Otherwise, in Phædra, the wife of Theseus would have made amorous advances to Hippolytus on the stage; instead of the fine description of Theramenes, we should have had Franconi's horses, and a terrific wooden monster; in Britannicus, Nero would have offered violence to Junia on the stage; in Bajazet we should have seen the combat of the brother of the Sultan with the eunuchs, &c. The most

wretched melo-drama may draw forth more tears than the most sublime tragedy. Genuine tears are those which are drawn forth by beautiful poetry, which flow at the sound of the lyre of Orpheus; they have their source in mingled admiration and grief. The ancients endowed even the Furies with personal beauty; because there is moral beauty in remorse.

That love of the hideous which has seized us, that horror of the ideal, that passion for lame and hunchbacked heroes, that sympathy with things that are loathsome, trivial, and vulgar, result from a depravity of feeling, which we have not received from Nature, of which we talk so much. Even when we love that which is in a certain degree ugly, it is because we see in it a certain degree of beauty. We naturally prefer a beautiful woman to a plain one, a rose to a thistle, the bay of Naples to the plain of Montrouge, the Parthenon to a pig-sty. It is the same in things figurative and moral. Away then with that animalized and materialized world which would lead us, even in the effigy of the object, to prefer our likeness copied, with all its defects, by a machine to our portrait painted by the pencil of Raphael.

Still I do not pretend to deny the forced changes which time and revolutions produce in

literary as well as in political opinions; but these changes do not justify the corruption of taste; they only enable us to scorn one of its causes. It is perfectly natural that changes of manners should vary the forms of our pleasures and our pains.

Internal silence prevailed during the absolute monarchy of the reign of Louis XIV and also during the drowsy listlessness of the reign of Louis XV. Wanting emotions within, our dramatic poets sought them from without. They borrowed catastrophes from Greece and Rome, to excite the sympathy of auditors, who were so unfortunate as to have among themselves only subjects of laughter. The French public were in those days so unaccustomed to tragic events, that a writer could not venture to present even fictitious scenes of a very sanguinary nature. Horrors would have excited disgust, even had they been three thousand years old, and consecrated by the genius of Sophocles.

But now that the people having risen into importance, and play a part in the government, like the chorus in Greek tragedy; when real spectacles of terror have occupied us for the space of forty years, the impulse communicated to society has a tendency to communicate itself to the drama. The classic tragedy, with its unities,

and its immoveable scenery, necessarily appears cold; and from coldness to tedium there is but a step. By this we may explain, without defending it, the extravagant character of the modern drama, which is the fac-simile of every crime, and presents to the eye of the audience, scaffolds and executions, murders, rapes, and incests, the phantasmagoria of churchyards and haunted castles.

We have now neither actors to perform classic tragedy, nor spectators capable of judging and enjoying it. The regular, the true, and the beautiful, are neither known, felt, nor appreciated. Our taste is so corrupted by the indifference and the vanity of the age, that, if the charming society of the Lafayettes, the Sévignés, the Geoffrins, and the Philosophers, could be revived, it would appear to us insipid. Before and after civilization, when the taste for intellectual objects has either not arisen or has passed away, mankind seek the representation of material objects. Nations begin and end with gladiators and puppets; children and old men are puerile and cruel.

STRIKING BEAUTIES OF SHAKSPEARE.

If I were required to say which I consider the finest of the plays of Shakspeare, I should hesitate between Macbeth, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Julius Cæsar and Hamlet. I do not however, very highly esteem the much eulogised soliloquy; I always ask myself how the philosophic Prince of Denmark could entertain the doubts which he expresses on the subject of a future state. After his conversation with the "poor ghost" of the King, his father, ought not his doubts to have been at an end?

One of the most powerful dramatic scenes in existence is that of the three queens in Richard III. Margaret, after retracing her own misfortunes to harden herself against the miseries of her rival, ends with these words :

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