every country of Europe. He probably deceived himself; but if he has described himself faithfully, there must have been another passion at the bottom; which seeks for gratification as steadily as avarice, ambition, or pride: it is vanity. But in these pages we see no more than the polished exterior of the Prince de Ligne. He may have been every thing that his editor assures us he was, polite, humane, and amiable, We do not wish to go beyond the record; nor to seek for meannesses, foibles, or vices of which we have received no evidence from the documents before us.

ART. XI.-Theatre des Auteurs du second Ordre, &c.

Collection of Tragedies and Comedies as at present acted on the French Stage, intended as a Continuation to the Stereotype Editions of Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Reynard, Crebillon, and Voltaire, with biographical Notices of the Authors, a List of their Pieces, with the Dates of their first Representations. 8 Vols. in 18mo. A Paris chez Nicolle et le Normant. 1808.

WE believe the above to be the first attempt made to collect the works of the minor French dramatists; the editors do not seem, however, to have been indiscriminate in the choice of the materials for their volumes, and their notices of various dramatic authors, and of their productions, exhibit appearances of being dictated by a correct and elegant taste for polite literature.

If we can pardon the unblushing national vanity displayed in the following introductory remarks, they contain some truths which have been but too much overlooked by the English dramatists of modern times,

Our theatre exhibits the most brilliant portion of our literary glory. The various geniuses who have contributed to its lustre, have equalled the ancients in the exhibition of the passions, and have almost always excelled them in the management of the fable; it would be easy to demonstrate as an incontrovertible truth, that in this latter department of the drama, they have only followed the truly regular pieces of the Greek authors, which are but few in number, while none of the productions of our modern French dramatists wander from these severe rules, which are nothing else than the term of perfection to which good sense and experience must inevitably bring all the arts and sciences by degrees in short these rules, against which some neighbouring nations have so absurdly declaimed that they almost deserve the epithet of barbarians, are merely the result of the constant com

parison which we usually make between objects, represented with a view to please, and the more or less pleasure, which these simitative representations afford. Productions which have at once charmed the ignorant and the learned of all countries and of all conditions have necessarily been regarded as of superior excellence, this has been uniformly demonstrated by an effect equally constant in proportion to the correctness of the relations kept up by the author with the intellectual powers of the human mind; it has been from this incontestible experience, that correct and peuetrating minds have long meditated upon literary productions of celebrity, for the sake of unravelling the causes of the numerous profound and lasting impressions which they have made upon the human mind in general. Dramatic rules are nothing else than an exposition of these latent causes, which they have brought up from the recesses of the human mind; and according to this definition which cannot well be contested, we may lay it down as a principle, (the rules so foolishly ridiculed by ignorance and bad taste being simply founded upon the observation of nature), that we lose sight of what is true and natural, when we refuse to submit to her dictates without resérvation or restriction. These were the opinions which regulated Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, and Quintilian, and to adopt a different way of thinking, would be to renounce from mere wantonness, the first elements of common sense.'

The author of this introduction then proceeds to express his surprise that with these great truths constantly before their eyes, the English should continue to tolerate what he is pleased to call the literary monstrosities of Shakespeare; here we discover the malignity of a pupil of Voltaire, and whose ignorance of the genius of our language, is perhaps more to be censured than the nationality peculiar to the French character. He proceeds to exult over our barbarism in a strain of affected liberality of sentiments, although nothing can exceed the charlatanerie of the latter part of the following passage.

• We must search for the causes of such prodigious contradictions, elsewhere than in the vices of the mind, in fact it would be absurd to refuse good sense and judgment to whole generations, or to assert that men who have shewn themselves to be rational in many departments of literature should become extravagant on one particular subject. A mystery like this can only be explained by referring to the weaknesses of the heart, it is in the humiliation of their national pride, it is from the vexation of being left at such a distance behind us, that they can never expect to become our rivals, it is this despair and consciousness of their inferiority, which has induced them to seek for consolation, by inventing frivolous systems against which their reason must evolt every moment.'

After consigning the English stage to a state of eternal infancy and imbecility, we find some well written panegyrics upon Corneille, Racine, and Moliere, the fathers of the French stage, and in which all men of taste will cheerfully concur, notwithstanding the depreciation in which our immortal bard has been uniformly held by the French critics. In his zeal for the superiority of the French theatre, over all others, our author tells his readers, that even the dramatic works in his collection which may be regarded as below mediocrity in France, possess an incontestiḥle superiority over the most celebrated foreign dramas, particularly in the essentials of the conduct and composition of the table. It is but justice, however, to admit that the selections before us teem with varieties of every description. In the comic department, we find correct and lively pictu es of manners, and the dialogue is generally spirited and easy while the national apti tude for intrigue is not more strikingly displayed in any department of French literature, than in the select effusions of the comic muse.

:

Those who are familiar with the sublimities of Corneille and Racine will be struck with a lamentable falling off in the tragic productions of their successors as exhibited in the selec tions before us With respect to tragedy, the age of chivalry seems to be gone in France as well as throughout Europe.

The principal modern tragedies given to the public through the medium of the above publication are the, Cornus of La Harpe; the Mustapha and Zeangir of Champfort and the Spiseis of Poinsinet. Of this last it must be confessed that the fable is romantic, but the sentiments are often distinguishable for great beauty in point of style it approaches nearer to the great models of Corneille and Racine than any of the selections, which we have perused.

The admirers of Thalia will find about thirty comedies in these volumes, which at this moment enjoy great celebrity on the French stage. Of these the most classical are the Bourgeoises a la mode of Dancourt, the Mariage secret, of Desfaucherets, the Phinta of Fabre; the Femme jalouse of Desforges and the Barbier de Seville of Beaumarchais. Besides these we find almost the whole of the dramatic works of Collin d'Harleville who is described as

A playful and spirited author, with an eloquent and graceful style, his imagination being more conspicuous than his talent for observation, and possessing the real quality of being amiable, even in his faults.

The volumes of which we have given the present sketch are stereotyped in Didot's best manner,and are so arranged that the works of any particular author may be detached from the whole, and bound up separately.

ART. XII.-Vertheidigung des grosser Cölln.

Defence of the Great Cölln, 8vo. Cologue. 1808. UNDER the title Vienna and Berlin,' a travelled noble. man, named Von Cölln, published a series of letters, describing his tour, and criticising, with offensive sincerity, the places and people he fell in with. The satirical character of his remarks, the unusual inurbanity of his notices, procured him readers of the coarser sort. And now a critic starts up, who, under pretext of apologizing for this abusive traveller, in fact composes a pasquinade against the original work; which is here dissected letter by letter, and made to supply, as Blackmore in Pope's essay on the Bathos, a series of examples of the art of sining on the road. His cynicisms, his military criticisms, his various personalties, and his topographic libels, are succes ively ridiculed. bu by no means in so lively a manner as Sir John Carr in the Pocket-book

The locality of this work renders all extract preposterous; it betrays the displeasure of a Berlin-man, who is piqued at the preference given to Vienna, and at the ridicule cast on his own metropolis. One lúdicrous anecdote of ignorance can be understood here. Among he errata in Von Cölln's book occurs the following:

For Adjeu nou marchons un gloire, read Adjeu nous marchons au gloire where the very correction leaves one blunder in adieu and another in the gender of gloire.

ART. XIII.-Levana or Erziehungslehere von Jean Paul. Levana, or the doctrine of Education, by John Paul. 2 Vols. Brunswick. 1807.

THIS comprehensive subject is discussed by Mr. Paul under the following heads, which constitute the contents of the work.

Importance of education. Declamation against its influence. Declamation for its influence. Spirit and principle of education. The individuality of the ideal man. On the spirit of the times. Religious culture. Digression on the origin of man and of education. Gaiety of children. Sports of children. Dancing. Music. Commands, prohibitions. Punishments. Crying of children. On the credulity of children. On physical education. Female education. Madame Jaqueline's confession respecting education. Destination of the female

sex. Nature of women; proof of their transcendant purity of heart. Female culture, in respect to the rational faculty;-to purity ofheart; -to benignity of disposition ;-to domestic economy;-to knowledge and accomplishments ;-to captivations and dress ;-to serenity of mind. Private instructions of a prince to the chief gover-ness of his daughter. Education of a prince. Letter on the education of a Prince. Moral education of boys. Moral strength or dignity. Physical corroborants. Admiration. Injurious influence of fear. Love of life. Insufficiency of passion. Necessity of a virtuous ideal. Veracity. Culture of benevolence. Means of exciting it. Benevolence to animals. Dependence of the accomplishment on moral culture. Miscellaneous consolatory rules. Danger of the premature excitement of shame, and on the modesty of youth. More immediate object of education. Language and writing. Attention and imagination, mathematics and philosophy. Cultivation of wit. Culture of reflection, abstraction, self-consciousness. On the improvement of the memory. Improvement of the taste. Beauties determined by the external senses, by the internal sense. Classical culture. Conclusion.'

On these topics the author sometimes favours us with sagacious and pertinent observations; but his ideas are often involved in such a labyrinth of metaphysical obscurity that it is difficult to find out his meaning; the idiom of thinking among the literati in Germany is so very different from that in this country, that it is almost impossible to give a close version of what they say, so as be intelligible to the common

reader.

The author tells us that he has not read all the authors who have written on the subject of education; but the Emilius of Rousseau appears to have engaged his attention more than any other work. He thinks that no preceding works can be compared with his, and that the succeeding are rather copies than originals. It is not says he, the particular rules of Rousseau, of which many may be incorrect without injury to the whole, but it is the spirit of education, which pervades and animates his performance, that produced a salutary change in the schools of Europe, even down to the nursery. In no previous work on education were theory and practice so beautifully combined as in his; he was a man who could readily transform himself into a child; and thus he could best protect and explain the nature of children.

'No age,' says the author, has said and advised, and done so much with respect to education as ours, and no country so much as Germany, where the winged seeds of the philosophy of Rousseau have been wafted from France, and cultivated wherever a genial soil was found. The Ancients wrote and did little on the