threads of Iris's scarf are untwisted; all the poet's spells are broken, his charms dissolved: deserted on his own enchanted ground, he takes refuge in the groves of Philosophy; but there his divinities evaporate in allegory, in which mystic and insubstantial state, they do but weakly assist his operations. By associating his muse to philosophy, he hopes she may establish with the learned, the worship she won from the ignorant; so he makes her quit the old traditional fable, whence she derived her first authority and power, to follow airy hypotheses, and chimerical systems. Allegory, the daugher of Fable, is admired by the fastidious wit and abstruse scholar, when her mother begins to be treated as superannuated, foolish, and doting; but however well she may please and amuse, not being worshipped as divine, she does not awe and terrify like sacred mythology, nor ever can establish the same fearful devotion, nor assume such arbitrary power over the mind. Her person is not adapted to the stage, nor her qualities to the business and end of dramatic representation. L'Abbé L'Abbé du Bos has judiciously distinguished the reasons, why allegory is not fit for the drama. What the critic investigated by art and study, the wisdom of nature unfolded to our unlettered Poet, or he would not have resisted the prevalent fashion of his allegorizing age; especially as Spenser's Fairy Queen was the admired work of the times. Allegorical beings, performing acts of chivalry, fell in with the taste of an age that affected abstruse learning, romantic valour, and high-flown gallantry. Prince Arthur, the British Hercules, was brought from ancient ballads and romances, to be allegorized into the knight of magnanimity, at the court of Gloriana. His knights followed him thither, in the same moralized garb: and even the questynge beast received no less honour and improvement from the allegorizing art of Spenser, as has been shewn by a critic of great learning, ingenuity, and taste, in his observations on the Fairy Queen. Our first theatrical entertainments, after we emerged from gross barbarism, were of the allegorical kind. The Christmas carol, and Carnival shows, the pious pastimes of our holy-days, were turned into pageantries and masques, all symbolical and allegorical. Our stage rose from hymns to the Virgin, and encomiums on the Patriarchs and Saints; as the Grecian tragedies from the hymns to Bacchus. Our early poets added narration and action to this kind of psalmody, as Æschylus had done to the song of the goat. Much more rapid indeed was the progress of the Grecian stage towards perfection. Philosophy, poetry, eloquence, all the fine arts, were in their meridian glory, when the Drama first began to dawn at Athens, and gloriously it shone forth, illumined by every kind of intellectual light. Shakspeare, in the dark shades of Gothic barbarism, had no resources but in the very phantoms, that walked the night of igno rance rance and superstition: or in touching the latent passions of civil rage and discord : sure to please best his fierce and barbarous audience, when he raised the bloody ghost, or reared the warlike standard. His choice of these subjects was judicious, if we consider the times in which he lived; his management of them so masterly, that he will be admired in all times. In the same age, Ben Jonson, more proud of his learning than confident of his genius, was desirous to give a metaphysical air to his works. He composed many pieces of the allegorical kind, established on the Grecian mythology, and rendered his playhouse a perfect pantheon.-Shakspeare disdained these quaint devices: an admirable judge of human nature, with a capacity most extensive, and an invention most happy, he contented himself with giving dramatic manners to history, sublimity and its appropriated powers and charms to fiction; and in both these arts he is unequalled The Catiline and Sejanus of Jonson Jonson are cold, crude, heavy pieces; turgid where they should be great; bombast where they should be sublime; the sentiments extravagant; the manners exaggerated; and the whole undramatically conducted by long senatorial speeches, and flat plagiarisms from Tacitus and Sallust. Such of this author's pieces as he boasts to be grounded on antiquity and solid learning, and to lay hold on removed mysteries*, have neither the majesty of Shakspeare's serious fables, nor the pleas ing sportfulness and poetical imagination of his fairy tales. Indeed if we compare our countryman in this respect, with the most admired writers of antiquity, we shall, perhaps, not find him inferior to them.Eschylus, with greater impetuosity of nius than even Shakspeare, makes bold incursions into the blind chaos of mingled allegory and fable, but he is not so happy in diffusing the solemn shade; in casting the dim, religious light that should reign there. When he introduces his Furies, and other * Prologue to the Masque of Queens. ge super |