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the dramatic compositions, of which he supplies a list in the appendix, Guillen de Castro wrote some poems. Three of them we have met with in the publication, entitled, "Coleccion de las Obras Sueltas, assi en prosa como en verso, de D. Frey Lope Felix de Vega Carpio del Habito de San Juan, Madrid, 1779," in twenty-one volumes. The one is a cancion, ("Anhelando pasaron"); another is in decimas, (" Pide agua quando yo"); and both these occur in the eleventh volume, 404 and 469: the third is in the twelfth volume, in octavas, ("De grande culpa en su inocente esposa.") The lines of several of the verses are easy and flowing, but these pieces do not shew sufficient talent to induce us to submit them to the attention of our readers.

In concluding we congratulate the public on the ability with which Lord Holland has fulfilled the design he had some years entertained, of conferring this additional present on the friends of Spanish literature; and we believe that we are not among the least ardent of those friends, or among the least sensible of the merit of his present attempt, and the success with which his purpose has been accomplished.

ART 11. Narratice of a Residence in Ireland during the Summer of 1814, and that of 1815. By ANNE PLUMPTRE, Author of Narrative of a Three Years' Residence in France, &c. Illustrated with numerous Engravings of Remarkable Scenery. London, Colburn, 1817. 4to. pp. 398.

FEMALE travellers must, of necessity, experience many difficulties to which the other sex is not exposed, and though Irishmen (according to the partial testimony of one of their poets) "are not to be tempted by woman or gold," yet perhaps there is no country, under present circumstances, in which a lady wishing to make a tour" with nobody in her company but herself," (to make use of an Iricism), would find those difficulties so numerous or insurmountable. To undertake such an expedition as that which has been performed by Miss Plumptre, would require more courage than even some men possess; in that kind of fortitude, however, which consists in endurance, women are often found superior, and they are besides gifted with greater curiosity as a motive to its exertion.

Recollecting the disturbed state of Ireland for the last

ten years, in consequence of which the mails were frequently escorted by a troop of dragoons, and private travellers were sometimes put under the protection of a corporal's guard; even supposing Miss Plumptre to enjoy all the fortitude, and more than the ordinary curiosity of her sex, it still appears to us a bold enterprize; and if we were to judge merely from the general nature of the work which is the result of it, scarcely worth the hazard, for the author does not contrive to give a very agreeable or inviting representation of the places she visited. But, independently of the positive dangers to be braved from the unrestrained lawlessness of the inhabitants of some districts of Ireland, Miss Plumptre had to encounter all the inconveniences, and many of the calamities of bad roads and bad weather, besides the obstructions which the very nature of the scenery presented in some of the most picturesque situations. Without any great difficulty she could pass through a town, and could ascertain the amount of its inhabitants, their occupations, the number of churches, hospitals, &c. but who can read the account of a lady's visit to the Giant's Causeway, of her ascending precipices, crawling along trunks of trees thrown down as bridges, or stepping (we do not use the more appropriate word) over chasms from one lofty rock to another, without being alarmed, not only for her personal safety, but for her feminine delicacy. Once, indeed, according to Miss Plumptre's own confession, she was most awkwardly situated even on the public road, for the jaunting car on which she was travelling broke down, and she was thrown out "under circumstances (we quote her own words) so approaching to the ludicrous," that she does not deem it proper to enter into particulars; she mentions her great apprehensions for the safety of her driver, who, no doubt, in equal anxiety for the fate of his mistress, had directed his attention towards her, and probably beheld the "ludicrous circumstances" which Miss Plumptre has since concealed.

The details collected by the author, in the course of her journey, are extremely minute, and probably we should find them very accurate had we any inclination to enter into the investigation; but they are generally unimportant and uninteresting, and are besides to be found in the works, of other travellers: she seems determined to avoid, as far as possible, one imputation thrown upon Sir John Carr, of gossoping laxity, and runs therefore into a contrary extreme, speaking of Dublin, Belfast, and Cork as if they were

newly discovered places; she enters into all the particulars of their population, trade and buildings with as much precision as if she were supplying authentic relations of the unknown wonders of Tombuctoo, and she follows the meanders of the Shannon and the Liffey as if she were making a wonderful disclosure of the sources and causes of the Niger, or the Congo. We will illustrate our first remark by a quotation regarding the National Bank of Dublin, of which she speaks as if it had never been seen or even heard of until her time.

"Among the public buildings by which Dublin is now embellished, the first place must indisputably be allotted to the National Bank. This beautiful edifice was originally erected for the meeting of the houses of parliament; and it must be acknowledged that, while they sat there, the representatives of the younger sister country had a much more splendid place of assemblage than those of the elder. The building was begun in the year 1729, under the administration of Lord Carteret, and was ten years in being completed. At the union of the two countries, when the Irish were no longer to have a par liament of their own, and the edifice was rendered nugatory as to its original destination, it was sold to the bank directors, and after various necessary alterations was opened in the year 1808 for the new purpose to which it was destined.

"Over this building I was shown very completely, through the obliging attentions of Sir Arthur Clarke, who, being connected with some of the proprietors procured me entrance to places not commonly shown. In one room is a model of the building, on the scale of an eighth of an inch to a foot, which shows it as it is, almost a little town of itself. A considerable part of the roof constitutes a platform, on which a whole regiment might be stationed if necessary for the defence of the place, while a large armoury within would abundantly furnish arms for their equipment. The room where the House of Lords sat remains in its original state; it is ornamented with two well executed pieces of tapestry representing the siege of Londonderry and the battle of the Boyne; they are the production of a Dutch artist.

She is often quite as unnecessarily diffuse upon erections of much less importance, but we have taken the first that came to hand. There is indeed in the quarto before us an immense quantity of impertinent matter, and the author may well express a little soreness against the waggish author of My Pocket Book, whose shrewd satire has had the good effect of laying Sir John Carr asleep upon the shelf with his massive productions. At least, however, the Knight's "Stranger in Ireland" was amusing, and if he

thrust into his pages all sorts of anecdotes that night or might not relate to his tour, he did it in an entertaining and sometimes in an ingenious manner: this praise, however, can seldom be given to Miss Plumptre, who seems not to have the least relish of humour, and when she introduces a bythe-way story, generally takes care (judiciously perhaps) that it shall not be out of keeping with the rest of her book. We might produce many instances of whole pages devoted to any subject but that which could properly be included in the Narrative of a Residence in Ireland; at one time she gives a long relation of what passed on meeting an old friend, about whom nobody cares, scarcely even herself; and at another she spins out her work by tedious compliments to persons to whose houses she had obtained introductions, and of whose kindness she seems more than duly sensi

ble.

It appears that, by some means or other, Miss Plumptre became acquainted with Mr. Kean, the celebrated actor, and his wife, when first he acted before a London audience, and in the course of this Narrative she contrives to insert ten or a dozen discussions upon his various performances; what they have to do with a tour in Ireland, we are sure our readers are quite as much in the dark as ourselves, but we are certain of this, that their intrinsic merit would not entitle them to a place even among the hasty critiques inserted in the newspapers. The first mention of him occupies the moderate space of two sheets, and the other notices are about in the same proportion both as to dulness and duration. We are first treated with a very new comparison between Kemble and Kean, the whole point of which is, (if indeed it may be called a point) that the former plays the character, while the latter is the character he represents; the only fault we find with it is that we did not want to learn in a quarto upon Ireland, what we had already been told elsewhere a hundred times before. The observation is no doubt just, but what has it to do with the subject; we select the following specimen of this lady's talent for reviewing theatrical representations.

"Richard the Third was generally considered as his masterpiece till he played Sir Giles Overreach; this is now thought to dispute the palm with Richard. For my own part, finely as I think both these characters played, there are others which afford me still higher gratification; not perhaps that the playing is intrinsically superior, but that the characters speak so much more forcibly to CRIT. REV. VOL. V. Jan. 1817.

the heart and feelings. If I were to select that which of all others
appears to me the most surprising effort of genius, I should say it
is Othello. I do not indeed conceive it possible for acting to be
carried beyond Mr. Kean's performance in the third act, when Iago
is working the noble generous nature of the Moor into a phrenzy of
jealousy. Every feature of the countenance, every muscle, every
limb display the extremity of anger;--the working of the fingers is
agony, the quivering of the lip is agony; not an atom of the whole
frame but seems agonized almost beyond what human nature is
capable of sustaining: it is scarcely possible to convince oneself
that what appears such true nature is but assumed. By some per-
sons it is objected that Mr. Kean wants height for this character:
In the great warrior, they say, in the noble Moor, we expect a tall,
majestic, commanding figure. But let the annals of history both
ancient and modern be searched, we shall find that a large majority
of the most celebrated warriors have been little men: and let the
tragedy of Othello be attentively examined, we shall find the author
making his hero say,

· I have known the time when this little arm
And this good sword,' &c.

every where, besides, carefully impressing upon the reader that there was nothing in Othello's person to charm, but the reverse,— that it was by his mind alone Desdemona was captivated :—we shall find too wherever he is called the noble Moor, that quality applied solely to his disposition, his noble nature, never to his figure. One of Mr. Kean's very striking excellencies in this character is, that all his actions, all his gestures are truly Moorish, differing wholly from his action in other characters. He never throughout gives the idea of an European made up to represent a Moor, as is too palpably the case with most who attempt the character; he appears truly a native of another clime." (p. 59–60.)

We suspect that our readers will not be inclined to adopt Miss Plumptre's opinion, that Shakespeare meant to represent Othello as a man of inferior stature; for if "this little arm" is to be understood literally, the poet could have intended nothing else: the fact however is, that the above is one of the errors into which those who are minute observers of the text, and neglect, or do not understand the spirit of the poet, are apt to fall; in the same way we might prove that Falstaff was as thin as a country whipping post, because Prince Henry calls him "lean Jack;" or that Justice Shallow was a second Nestor because he is termed "wise Shallow." It is quite obvious that Othello, in the scene from which the above line and a half are quoted, could not descend to the insignificant consideration of whether his arm were small or large in comparison with those of the bye

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