regular classical tragedies; and would be an unanswerable reply to the prejudices and ignorance of those foreign critics who so glibly accuse the British drama of irregularity and barbarism. The life of this great and learned man was worthy of his genius, "preserving," to use the words of Oldys, "in his conduct, the true dignity of poesy, which he compared to the flower of the sun, that disdains to open its leaves to the eye of a smoking taper." He died, at the age of seventy-seven, in 1634. We will pass over Dekkar, a most prolific and multifarious dramatist, whose productions, however, are difficult to examine and appreciat, from his having generally written in partnership with other playwrights. He appears to have been by no means destitute of imagination, of pathos, or of humour; though his genius has always appeared to us rather lyric than dramatic. He was celebrated in his own day for his literary warfare with Jonson, whom he attacked in his Satiro-mastix;' his finest passages are marked by great felicity of idea, and a delicate music of expression. He died in 1638. John Webster, a mighty and funereal genius, is the next author we shall mention. We can compare his mind to nothing so well as to some old Gothic cathedral, with its arches soaring heaven-ward, but carved with monsters and angels, with saints and fiends, in grotesque confusion. Gleams of sunlight fall here and there, it is true, through the huge window, but they are coloured with the sombre dyes of painted glass, bearing records of human pride and human nothingness, and they fall in long slanting columns, twinkling silently with motes and dusty splendour, upon the tombs of the mighty; lighting dimly up now the armour of a recumbent Templar or the ruff of some dead beauty, and now feebly losing themselves amid the ragged coffins and scutcheons in the vaults below. His fancy was wild and powerful, but gloomy and monstrous, dwelling ever on the vanities of earthly glory, on the nothingness of pomp, not without many terrible hints at the emptiness of our trust, and many bold questionings of human hopes of a hereafter. "His phantasms appear often, and do frequent cemeteries, charnel-houses, and churches, where the devil, like an insolent champion, beholds with pride the spoils and trophies of his victory over Adam." Death is indeed his Muse; not the rose-crowned deity of the ancients, the brother of sleep, the bringer of repose, the winged genius with the extinguished torch, but the hideous skeleton of the monkish imagination, the "grim anatomy," with his crawling blood-worms, and all the loathsome horrors of physical corruption. His most striking plays are 'The White Devil,' 'The Duchess of Malfy' (Amalfi), Guise, or the Massacre of France,' and 'The Devil's Law-case.' In the second of these works, a tragedy in which pity and horror are carried to an intense and almost unendurable pitch, the death of the innocent and beautiful heroine is most power fully conceived his simple, direct, straightforward pathos is in the highest degree tragic and affecting; but his plots are totally extravagant, crowded with supernumerary horrors; and if he is occasionally touching and graceful, such passages resemble less the growth of a rich and generous soil, than the pale flowers which sometimes bloom amid the rank and obscene herbage of a crowded burial-ground, springing from fat corruption and watered with hopeless tears. This strange and powerful genius was contemporary in his life and death, as it is supposed, with Dekkar, and these two dramatists wrote many pieces together. Our space will only allow us to make a brief allusion to Middleton and Marston, the former of whom is remarkable for the use he has made in one of his plays of the popular witch or sorceress of his country's superstition, a circumstance to which some critics have attributed the original conception of Shakspeare's wondrous supernatural machinery in Macbeth. Middleton's witches are, however, nothing more than the traditional mischievous old women, described, it is true, with great vigour and spirit, while those of the greater bard are, as Charles Lamb finely says, "foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem to be without human relations. They come with thunder and lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we know of them. Except Hecate, they have no names; which heightens their mysteriousness." Marston is chiefly remarkable for a fine tone of moral satire: some of his invectives against vice and folly are grand abundant outpourings of Juvenalian eloquence, not without some of Juvenal's grim mirth and grave pleasantry. We must confess that our favourite among the minor Elizabethan dramatists—that is, after Shakspeare, Jonson, and Fletcher-is John Ford. Of a melancholy and pensive character-witness the strong portrait sketched by a contemporary hand "Deep in a dump John Ford alone was got sufficiently learned to enrich his scenes with many beautiful images borrowed from the ancients; possessing an ear for the softest harmony, and a heart peculiarly sensitive to pure and elevated emotion, this dramatist has depicted the passions, and particularly the love, of youth and innocence, with a tenderness and force which almost equals Shakspeare himself. Ford's instrument is of no great compass, but its tones are unmatched for softness, and he makes it "discourse most eloquent music." His finest plays are 'The Lover's Melancholy,' The Brother and Sister,' 'Love's Sacrifice,' 'The Fancies, Chaste and Noble,' and, above all, the admirable tragedy of 'The Broken Heart.' Do not these exquisite and fanciful titles seem to give earnest of purity, grace, tenderness, chivalrous love, and patient suffering? And the reader will not be disappointed. We do not mean to say that Ford is not sometimes coarse, sometimes licentious, and sometimes extravagant. Unfortunately the audiences. of that age required an intermixture of comic scenes, even in the most serious dramas; and Ford's genius was the very reverse of comic. With no humour in his soul, he seems, when trying to write his comic scenes (which are, with few exceptions, base and contemptible in the extreme), to have determined by a violent effort to renounce his own refined and modest character, and like a bashful man, who generally becomes impudent when he attempts to conquer his natural infirmity, he rushes at once from the airiest and most courtly elegance to the vilest and meanest buffoonery. But in his true sphere, what dramatist was ever greater? What author has ever painted with a more delicate and reverent hand the innocence, the timid ardour of youthful passion "le speranze, gl' affetti, and who has ever approached him in the representation of the patience and self-denial of that noblest and most unselfish of passions of the undying constancy of breaking hearts-in all the more divine and ethereal aspects of the sentiment? In the last play which we have spoken of, the pathos is absolutely carried so far that it oversteps the true limits of dramatic sufferance; nay, almost trangresses the bounds of human endurance. How confident must he have been in his own mastery over every manifestation of the passion which he has so delighted to portray, to have ventured in one drama two such characters as Penthea and Calantha! Ford has also never failed to interest us in a class of personages which it is very difficult to render attractive—the characters of hopeless yet unrepiuing lovers. We need only mention Orgilus and the noble Malfato. We now come to the last of these great dramatists, James Shirley. He was a man of learned education, who was at first destined for the clerical profession, but, disappointed in his hopes, took refuge in those two inevitable asylums of indigent erudition, first the school, and afterwards the theatre. His life was full of adventure, for it extended over a most busy period, namely from 1596 till after the Restoration. He had indeed passed through many vicissitudes, for he had fought in the civil wars on the royalist side; and his name forms the connecting link between the two periods of dramatic art, so widely different, one of which is typified in Shakspeare, and the other in Congreve. His works are praised for the elegance, nature, good sense, and sprightliness of their comic language; for the purity of the characters, particularly the female ones; and for the ease and animation of his plots. He has not much pathos, it is true, nor much knowledge of the heart; but there are few dramatists whose works give a more agreeable and unforced transcript of the ordinary scenes of life, conveyed in more graceful language. His humour, though not very profound, is true and fanciful, and his plays may always be read with pleasure, and often with profit. His best dramas are 'The Brothers,' 'The Lady of Pleasure,' and 'The Grateful Servant.' CHAPTER VIII. THE GREAT DIVINES. Theological Eloquence of England and France-The Civil War-Persecution of the Clergy Richard Hooker - His Life and Character-Treatise on Ecclesiastical Polity-Jeremy Taylor-Compared with Hooker-His Life -Liberty of Prophesying-His other works-The Restoration-Taylor's Sermons-Hallam's Criticism-Taylor's Digressive Style-Isaac BarrowHis immense Acquirements-Compared to Pascal-The English Universities. IN the department of Christian philosophy, and particularly in that subdivision of theological literature which embraces the eloquence of the pulpit, England has generally been considered inferior to many other European nations, and to France in particular. So splendid indeed are the triumphs of reasoning and of eloquence which are recalled to the remembrance of every cultivated mind at the mention of such illustrious names as Pascal, as Bossuet, as Bourdaloue, that the general reader (above all, the Continental one) is apt to doubt whether the Church of England has been adorned by any intellects comparable to these bright and shining lamps of Catholicism. We hope that we shall not be considered presumptuous if we endeavour to show that Great Britain does possess monuments of Christian eloquence equal or at least not inferior to the immortal productions of these great men, and, at the same time, if we attempt to explain how it has happened that the triumphs of English divinity are not so generally known and appreciated as those of the great French theologians. This latter circumstance will be found to proceed not only from the much more universal study throughout Europe of the French language as compared to the English (a partiality which, it must be confessed, is now daily wearing away), but also in some measure from the points of difference in many matters of religious belief and ecclesiastical discipline existing between the Anglican Church and that of Rome. There is, in short, a much greater apparent accordance, in these points, between the opinions of most of the Continental Churches and those of Rome, than exists between Romanism and the Church of England. Add to this, too, the more imposing and dazzling character of the French style, particularly that of the French pulpit, at the splendid epoch so brilliantly adorned by these admirable productions, and we shall not be at a loss to attribute to its real cause the comparative neglect experienced by the works of Hooker, Taylor, Barrow, South, and Stillingfleet. In instituting a general comparison between the productions of the French and English intellect, few persons have failed to remark one very striking point of dissimilitude, if not even of contrast; and this is, that the former will be found to possess their chief and characteristic beauties externally, while those of the latter are not to be perceived or appreciated without a greater degree of study and examination. We do not mean, by the use of the word "external," in any way to imply that the productions of French genius do not possess merits as real and as solid as those which adorn any literature in the world; we wish to express that those merits lie nearer to the surface and are brought more prominently forward in the great trophies of French intellect than in those of the British mind. Whether we examine the drama of the two countries, their eloquence or their poetry, we shall almost invariably find that, while the merits and peculiar graces of the Gallic intellect are conspicuously and prominently placed as it were in the foreground of the picture, the British Muse is of a coyer and more retiring temper, and only yields herself to ardent and persevering pursuit "With sweet, reluctant, amorous delay." This deep and internal character of our literature arises in a great measure from that Teutonic element which plays so important a part in every development of English nationality-in the literature of the country, in its language, in its social condition, and in its political institutions. The regular and beautiful forms of classical literature -simple, severe, intelligible as the proportions of the Grecian architecture which the French have generally made their models, are certain at the very first view to strike, to please, and to elevate; while the English literature and no portion of it more justly than the one now under our consideration-may rather be compared to the artful wildness, the studied irregularity of some Gothic cathedral. Its proportions are less obvious, its outline less distinct; its rich and varied ornaments can only be understood, and its multiplicity of parts can only be harmonized into a beautiful and accordant whole, by the spectator who will pass some time and exert some patience in study |