nurse. If she falls in your or Lady Eleanor's way, you will tell me if the original supports, in any degree, the encomiums of the translator's preface, since it is printed, page by page, with the English.

Do you not admire the poetic sublimity of Coleridge's Ode to the Departed Year, however you may be shocked, as I am shocked, by the presumptuous and unpatriotic excess of condemnation which it pours forth on this country, as if England were the pest and execration of the whole world! It calls us the bloody island. Great, I must confess, has its national guilt appeared to me within the past ten years; yet, I hope, it is not so dark, so extreme, so accursed of God and man, as this ode asserts; but, as poetry, I scarce know any thing superior to the following passage:

« Departed Year! 'twas on no mortal shore
My soul beheld thy vision. Where alone,
Voiceless and stern, before the cloudy throne
Ay Memory sits; there, garmented with gore,
With many an unimaginable groan,

Thou storiest thy sad hours. Silence ensued,

Deep silence, through th' etherial multitude,

Whose clustering locks with snow-white glories shone.

Then, his eyes wild ardours glancing,

From the choired host advancing,

The Spirit of the Earth made reverence meet,
And stood up beautiful before the cloudy seat."

I have lent the book, and, therefore, quoting from recollection, may possibly be inaccurate in one or two words; but what a sublime image is that of Memory, and I believe it perfectly original; nor less original, less exquisite is that of the Spirit of the Earth. Indistinctness in description is, on certain rare occasions, a poetic excellence, where the object mentioned is of too transcendent splendour to be conceived with precision, either by the poet or his reader. Such is the Spirit of the Earth in this ode: his glory is ineffable,—and the words stood up beautiful, renouncing every aim at determinate picture, leave the imagination of the reader, if he has imagination, thrilled with a consciousness of superhuman perfection. Sublimity, in the highest possible degree, thus results from indistinctness in Milton's portrait of Death when he encounters Satan; and infinite poetic beauty, from the same source, when Ossian "Fair says: as the spirit of the hill, when it glides in a sun

beam at noon, over the silence of Morven."

I remain, dearest Madam, &c.

LETTER XXXV.

REV. T. S. WHALLEY.

April 16, 1799.

THE first fateful night of your tragedy is at hand. I shall inquire after its reception with agitated solicitude. My pen has endeavoured to secure the attendance, interest, and support of all my London correspondents on this occasion.You have never told me even its title; but I observed to them that a new tragedy, to be presented in the course of this week, and through whose scenes Mrs Siddons was pledged to exert her powers and her graces, must be yours; and that, from your long mutual friendship, they would be exerted con amore.

I have seldom experienced a literary longing of so much impatience as to see your play. If it has the interest, pathos, and spirit of your domestic epic, the fascinating Edwy and Edilda, I shall love it, even if you have put it into the strictest fetters of the unities. A weak defence of them accidentally came in my way, since I last wrote to you upon the subject. It was written, some

twelve years since, by the late Mr Hodson, fellow of one of the Cambridge colleges, and author of the tragedy Zoraida, a man of considerable talents and scholastic reputation. He pronounces that the limits, as to time, ought not to exceed twenty-four hours; but, if they exceed the time of the performance at all, limiting restraint is useless, is pernicious. Useless, because it is impossible to lose the consciousness that the, play is a representation, not a reality. Pernicious, because it is seldom, indeed, that such a small portion of existence can supply events, which place the persons of the drama in those varied and contrasting situations, which shew the characters in different points of view, as acting under the influence of dissimilar circumstances and passions.

Mr Hodson had studied Shakespeare so little as to observe that, finely as he has written," his plays would have possessed still greater superiorihad he observed the rules of Aristotle."

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All who feel Shakespeare's excellence, and examine the causes of his infinitely surpassing powers, respecting all other dramatic writers, Greek, Roman, French, German, and English, in the representation of life, of the passions, and manners, will feel that his disdain of those rules is not an error to be pardoned on the score of his poetic and characteristic recompenses, but one powerful

ly operative means by which he acquired his confessed transcendence. Could he have been engaged to have new-modelled his Macbeth in an approach to the restraints of the unities, as to time and place, observe what it must have lost;the heath-scene; the banquet-scene; the cavescene; the castle-scene, and its siege,—with all their animating changes, all the characteristic varieties, all the poetic sublimities resulting from situations of such inspiriting difference!—all lopt and lost; while, for the business of one evening, and even for an elapse of twenty-four hours, what superfluous speeches, what spun-out declamation, must have been made to have dragged the murder of Duncan through five acts? Then the admirable moral sacrificed, which results from the gradual progression of vice in the character of Macbeth;-a mind, once great and noble, proceeding to the last excesses of superfluous cruelty. That could not naturally happen in the course of twenty-four hours.

Who can ponder these things, and, if they write plays, not wish to avail themselves of an example so pregnant with dramatic advantages! Besides, it is known that Aristotle formed his rules upon the preceding examples of the Greek poets. Let modern critics do the same; and, since we have