mischiefs of the fanatic principles, which, from the eloquence and the private virtues of three able writers, have attracted so much attention, and obtained so much indiscriminate praise. By those principles was our great moral poet, so lately vanished, induced to attempt to blast, and wither at the very root, that meed of national applause to which intellectual exertion looks for its reward:.

"That joys to think its efforts may create
Existence far beyond the common date,
His wealth of mind to lasting ages give,
And in futurity's affection live*."

Mr Cowper, whatever private friendship he might have had for Mr Hayley, must, from his avowed principles, together with Mr Gisborne, and all of that school, have surveyed the warm devotion of his muse to the exertions of genius, with the sort of eyes with which, in Godwin's sublimely fabulous novel, Bethlem Gabor looked upon the benevolent exertions of St Leon in Hungary.

I remain, my dear bard, &c.

* Hayley's Essays on History.-S.

LETTER LV.:

EARL OF CARLISLE.

Lichfield, July 17, 1800.

MY LORD, I am honoured and obliged by the present of your Lordship's play*; and prefer the hazard of being thought obtrusive to that of seeming ungrateful.

It gratifies me to see this tragedy written in the Shakespearean school as to style; and in the intermixture of wit and humour in the dialogue, and of the grotesque with the elevated in the characters. Such blending, by whatever name of barbarous or Gothic it may be stigmatized, gives that ease and spirit which are strangers to the declamatory and solemn coldness of modern tragedy. The lighter traits, by contrasting those of pathos and horror, increase their force.

Dryden's opinion veered on more than one subject of dramatic criticism. Your Lordship knows he not only sanctioned, by his practice, that monstrous production, a tragedy in rhyme, but de

The Stepmother.-S.

fended its adoption, which perpetually betrayed him into ludicrous bombast where he meant to be impassioned.

Except to the pedant, names are little, Grecian, Gothic, or Gallic. That mixture of the comic and serious in tragedy, which Dryden condemns, against his own example, as Gothic, is justified by more infallible tests than his taste or decision, learned and ingenious as he was; by the practice of the so much superior Shakespeare-by Johnson's able defence of that practice, in his edition of those peerless dramas; by the construction of the human mind, and by the natural course of circumstances and events. The drama, whether serious or comic, affecting to be the mirror of human existence, is most excellent when most faithful to its design, excepting that measure, though not rhyme, is essential to the true dignity of the tragic muse. A tragedy in prose, is that nearer approximation to life, which we find in wax-work compared with fine painting. Yet who prefers the substantial to the shadowy representation? Mrs Wright's men and women to the portraits of Reynolds and Romney? George Barnwell to the Merchant of Venice?

Since life is a motley texture of mirth and sorrow, rudeness and refinement, elevation and debasement, the judicious introduction of those

varieties, as well as of the broader opposites of vice and virtue, best produces that first dramatic excellence, fidelity to nature.

Will your Lordship allow me a yet extended trespass upon your patience, while I advert to the passages in the play which stand most prominent on my approbation: the speech of the Countess on the 16th page, beginning, "You much mistake me," Isabella's comment upon it-The soliloquy of Casimir in the gallery.—It is poetic, it is Shakespearean. Also the Count's second audible meditation" Yet to resign her;"-it breathes the genuine feelings of an heart, in which enamoured passion is the Aaron's rod. Lord Henry's description of the guilt-created phantom, is new and sublime; the abbot's basis of education admirable. Such sentiments render the drama a potent vehicle of virtuous impressions. From their unexpected occurrence, they sink deeper into the mind than do congenial axioms from the pulpit. So true is it, not only that a verse may, but that a verse often will, catch him who flies a sermon. Frederic's jealousy is stimulated with great dramatic art—and of high poetic beauty is Lord Henry's speech, commencing at the bottom of the 76th page; so also Louisa's nocturnal soliloquy, viz.

"The evening's cold and dreary; the dull clouds
Cling to the mountain's brow."

We see, we feel the scene. A judicious, that is, not too lavish introduction of scenic-painting into dramatic composition, has an infinitely fine effect:

"Light thickens, and the crow

Makes wing to th' rocking wood!"

In all the editions, rocking is written rooky wood. The unmeaning epithet passes unscrutinized by Warburton and Johnson, though supposed to have descended from that pen, from which scarcely one has descended which does not picture the substantive, or, at least, strengthen it. A transcriber might easily mistake rocking for rookybut criticism ought to suspect his fidelity, rather than the poet of a pleonasm so notorious. A rook being only a larger species of crow, it would not be much worse writing to say, the crow makes wing to th' crowy wood. The doubtless real adjective intended was rocking, which, making the night stormy, increases the horror.

Another fine effect of interest in the speaker's situation, increased by scenic trait, is in the expressed despair of Varanes, in Lee's Theodosius,