society in France than the poet himself. As to the general merit of his verses we shall add one observation, which has escaped M. de Châteaubriand. The great peculiarity of Béranger is the mixture of gaiety and pathos, which he combines with the happiest effect. He, indeed, mingles the grave and gay, the lively and severe,' with a very original and singular felicity. This merit has not escaped the author himself; in his own behalf he claims, as his special praise, that—

'D'un luth joyeux il attendrit les sons.'

La bonne Vieille, v. i.

P. 242

With one other remark we shall conclude-though, perhaps, it might be spared, for it can hardly have escaped our readers— that it is exceedingly surprising that a person, whose early life was so miserably mean and whose education appears to have been no better than his humble station, should have produced odes (as M. de Châteaubriand very justly denominates them) of an elegance of diction, a facility of expression, and a harmony of versification not exceeded in the language. It may aid our reader's speculations on this curious subject to be informed that this smooth facility, this apparently spontaneous flow, is the result of the most anxious care and deliberation; that M. Béranger's composition is slow to a degree that deserves the epithet of painful; that the conception of each song is the work of time, and that many couplets have cost him hours of labour.

ART. VII.-The History of English Dramatic Poetry, to the time of Shakspeare, and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration. By J. Payne Collier, Esq. 3 vols. 8vo. London.

1831.

THE comprehensive and philosophic spirit of modern poetical criticism has fully recognised the high rank which the national drama of England may claim among the creations of the human imagination; the name of Shakspeare not only receives its just homage throughout the vast regions over which the English language is spread, on the shores of the Ganges, the Mississippi, and the St. Lawrence; but throughout the continent of Europe, he is read either in the original language, or in successive and multiplying translations. The admirers of the classical drama are at length obliged to admit a rival near the throne,' even where they are not driven from the field,' by what they consider the Gothic invasion of the romanticists. It is curious to observe the manner in which the best French writers now speak of Shakspeare, (the Germans, it is well known, go almost beyond our own national pride, in their admiration of our great dramatist,) and to contrast it with the half jealous, but half patronizing eulogy of

Voltaire,

Voltaire, and the still timid and apologetic phrase of La HarpeLa tragédie fut violée par un géant. Such is the lively expression of the latter critic, embodying his notion of the wonderful power, as well as of the utter lawlessness of the barbarous poet. Nor is the knowledge of the older English drama confined to Shakspeare; abroad as well as at home, curiosity and admiration are beginning to be excited, by the fertility as well as the genius of a theatre, in which poets like Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, occupy the second rank, while for the third, remain such names as Marlowe, Ford, Middleton, and Webster.*

The origin and progress of this theatre, the slow or rapid manner in which so splendid a branch of the great works of human invention attained its perfection; the favourable circumstances which fostered its growth, or the adverse out of which it struggled by the creative power of its earliest masters these questions would be legitimate objects of historical inquiry, even if they only served to throw light on the poetic life of Shakspeare. The history of the English stage would be a pursuit of the highest intellectual interest, if its only result should be to decide on the accuracy or inaccuracy of Dryden's assertion, that Shakspeare created the stage among us: whether the romantic drama of England, as has been finely said of Greek tragedy in relation to Eschylus, sprung from the head of Shakspeare, perfect and in complete armour, as Pallas from that of Jove. It would be but the legitimate homage to such genius, to examine, with the utmost minuteness, into the state in which he found and in which he left his art; how much he owed to his predecessors, and how far the character and circumstances of his age tended to foster and develope his powers. Yet, considering the long array of volumes to which our editions of Shakspeare have extended, the vast advanced guard of prolegomena, the countless rabble of notes which impede his triumphant progress, and the heavy baggage of dissertations which bring up the rear; considering the number and the avidity of the black letter dogs,' whom the author of the Pursuits of Literature, at the close of the last century, described as hanging on the flanks, and draining the life-blood of the dramatic Actæonwe might have supposed the subject, by this time, completely exhausted; and, however some master-mind might be wanting to compress, to reduce into order to extract all that was intrinsically valuable from the immense and discordant mass, and to cast it into one agreeable narrative-we should scarcely have ex

*We met with, some years ago, the first volume of a very interesting work by Tieck (one of the ablest and most learned of German critics, and we think, after Goethe, decidedly the first of German novelists), entitled 'Shakspeare's Vorschule ?'we do not know whether he has published more.

pected

pected that much further information could have been obtained, after the minute and laborious researches of the Stevenses and Malones. The volumes of Mr. Collier, however, prove that even in their own department the Shakspeare commentators have left much for future inquirers. The indefatigable diligence of this gentleman has led him to many unsuspected or unknown sources of information; while even in those which were open to former collectors, he has gleaned much, either overlooked by their negligence, or misrepresented by their haste. From our record offices, from public and private libraries, Mr. Collier, with infinite pains and perseverance, has brought together a vast mass of new and curious facts, illustrating that fertile and not altogether unprofitable subject, the amusements of our ancestors; and has traced the gradual though rapid manner, in which the religious representations of the monastic orders, and the barbarous but splendid shows of our Tudor Kings, were refined into the more intellectual and instructive romantic drama of the age of Elizabeth and James I. Had Mr. Collier displayed equal skill in the arrangement and distribution of his materials, as he has zeal and diligence in obtaining them, his work might have been, what it professes to be, a history of the English drama. At present, of great and varied interest to the antiquarian, and of inestimable value to the future historian of this branch of English poetry, it is rather a series of historical dissertations than a history; it is not one, but three separate works, the subjects of which the author has, after all, not been able to keep entirely distinct-Annals of the Stage, Annals of Dramatic Poetry, and an Account of Theatres and their Appurtenances. It is thus a sort of historic trilogy, but without any continuous interest; with three beginnings, three middles, and three ends; we are perpetually travelling onwards, and when we reach the goal, are called back again to start anew from the point at which we originally set forward. It might be difficult, but the increased popularity of his volumes would, we are persuaded, amply repay Mr. Collier for the trouble of recasting his whole work; of distributing it into one consecutive narrative, with its episodes skilfully interwoven, and some of the very curious documents, particularly the accounts, withdrawn from the text, (where they arrest and detain too long the attention of the common reader,) and thrown into an appendix. Unless Mr. Collier shall thus condescend to render his book more attractive, he must content himself with the praise of having made useful collections for the history of the drama, rather than of having adequately filled that chasm in our literary history of which he justly complains.

Religion was the parent of the modern, as of the ancient drama. Throughout the world, in India, as in Athens, the great religious

festivals

festivals were the periods at which dramatic representations were exhibited; and in modern Europe the clergy were the first actors, and the Bible was to the rude dramatists of the dark ages what Homer was to Eschylus and Sophocles. It is even supposed by some, that the Thespis of the modern European drama was no less than a most learned and canonized saint, Gregory NazianThis opinion, however, of Voltaire, to which Mr. Collier considers Warton to incline, is in fact entirely invalidated by the juster observations of Warton himself. In the fourth century, according to Voltaire,

zen.

Gregory Nazianzen, an archbishop, a poet, and one of the fathers of the church, banished pagan plays from the stage at Constantinople, and introduced select stories from the Old and New Testament. As the ancient Greek tragedy was a religious spectacle, a transition was made on the same plan; and the choruses were turned into Christian hymns. Gregory wrote many sacred dramas for this purpose, which have not survived those inimitable compositions over which they triumphed for a time. One, however, his Xpiatos máσxwv, or Christ's Passion, is still extant.* *In the prologue it is said to be in imitation of Euripides, and that this is the first time the Virgin Mary has been produced on the stage. The fashion of acting spiritual dramas, in which at first a due degree of method and decorum was preserved, was at length adopted from Constantinople by the Italians, who framed in the depth of the dark ages, on this foundation, that barbarous species of theatrical representation called Mysteries, or Sacred Comedies, and which were soon afterwards received in France.'Warton's Hist. of Engl. Poet., vol. iii. p. 196, 8vo. edit.

This is a genuine Voltairian hypothesis, ever brilliant and *The Xgioros Пdex is on many accounts a curious performance. It is nearly twice as long as any extant classical play, and must contain somewhere about three thousand lines. It infringes on the unities both of time and place. The scene changes from some part of Jerusalem, where the Virgin hears the tidings of the capture of Jesus, to the foot of the Cross, and our Saviour is introduced after his resurrection. Its contempt of quantity is very remarkable, as it does not appear to be in the least guided by accent. The following is a passage not without sweetness, and more than usually correct in metre. It is the Virgin's lamentation at the willing haste with which Jesus proceeds to his trial:

αἲ αἴ τι δράσω; καρδία γάρ οιχεται

πῆ πῆ πορεύη, τέκνον; ὡς ἀπολλύμην ἕκητι τοῦ νῦν (τὸν) ταχὺν τελεῖς δρόμον; μὴ γάμος αὖθις ἐν Κανᾷ, κἀκεῖ τρέχεις, ἶν' ἐξ ὕδατος οἰνοποίησεις ξένως ; εφέψομαι σοι, τέκνον ; Ἡ μενῶ σ' ἔτι ; δὸς, δὸς λόγον μοι, τῇ Θέα πατρὸς λόγε, μὴ δὴ παρέλθης σίγα δείλην μητέρα. νῦν γὰρ στόματος φιλία χρήζω σέθεν φωνῆς ἀκᾶσαι, καὶ προσειπεῖν, ω τέκνον δος μοι προς αυτα πατρος, ὦ τέκνον, σεθεν, σὲ θεσπεσία χρωτὸς ἅψασθαι χεροῖν, ψαῦσαι ποδῶν τε καὶ περιπτύξασθαι σε The authorship of this play is, after all, very doubtful.

seductive,

seductive, but negligent or disdainful of fact and evidence. We are not aware that any proof has been adduced that these sacred dramas of Gregory, and his more prolific poetical rival, the heretic bishop Apollinaris, were ever acted. Warton himself has suggested, what appears to be the fact, that these dramas were composed, not for the theatres of Constantinople, to expel their rightful lords, Sophocles, Euripides, and Menander, but for the Christian schools, into which were introduced a sacred Homer (that is to say, the Old Testament, as far as the life of Saul, thrown into hexameters) a sacred Pindar-and a sacred Plato (into an imitation of whose Dialogues the Gospels were cast), as well as sacred dramas on scriptural subjects. The ecclesiastical historians assert that this practice originated in a prohibition issued by Julian against the use of the pagan poets and philosophers in the Christian seminaries,—an edict strangely at variance with the profound policy of the apostate emperor for the subversion of Christianity. It is far more probably to be ascribed to the pious apprehensions of the church, than to the short-sighted jealousy of the emperor. The date of these productions, the reign of Julian, when the church (for a period however short) was standing on the defensive, is irreconcilable with the notion that they were composed with a view of assailing paganism in its last strong-hold, the theatre. However difficult it is to trace, in the vague language of the ecclesiastical writers and Byzantine historians, the decay and gradual extinction of the legitimate Grecian drama, it is most probable that the degenerate taste of the pagans contributed to its downfall as much as the holy zeal of the Christians. The tragedies of Eschylus and Euripides waned before the furious excitement of the hippodrome, which, notwithstanding the devout thunders of the patriarchs, deluged Christian Constantinople with blood; and those more shameless exhibitions, which were yet better suited to the passions of a dissolute and rapidly barbarizing populace. At all events, however the genuine ancient drama may have struggled for existence, both against a religion which denounced it as forming an integral part of the great system of pagan idolatry; and against the spirit of an unworthy age, incapable of refined and intellectual amusements, and only stimulated by the coarser and more violent excitement of the gladiator, the chariot race, the conjurer, and the buffoon;there is still a vast chasm which separates the dissolution of the ancient from the birth of the modern drama. The connexion between the Christian drama of the fourth century in Constantinople modelled on the Athenian, if it ever existed as a public spectacle, and the ruder miracle plays of western Europe, which *The few expressions in the tragedy of Gregory, which have been relied on, are merely the conventional terms which so close an imitator of the ancient stage would naturally transfer to his poem, and by no means imply the actual representation of the piece.

at