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R. SEWARD'S PREFACE. xxxiii Like jewels round about my head, to cool me.My eyes burn out and sink into their sockets.And my infected brain like brimstone boils;I live in hell and several furies vex me.Oh, carry me where never sun e'er shew*d yetA face of comfort, where the earth is crystal.Never to be dissolv'd, where nought inhabitsBut night and cold, and nipping frosts and winds.That cut the stubborn rocks, and make them shiver jSet me there, friends." Every reader of taste will see how superior this is to the quotationfrom Shakespeare. The images are vastly more numerous, more judi-ciousy more nervous, and the passions are wrought up to the highest Sitch; so that it may be fairly preferred to every tning of its kind m allhakespeare, except one scene of Lear's madness, which it would emulatetoo, could we see such an excellent comment on it as Lear receives fromhis representative on the stage. As these last quotations are not only specimens of dictiofi a,i\d sentiment^but of patsions inflamed into poetic enthusiasm; I shall refer the reader tosome other parallels of passiotis and characters that greatly resemble, andsometimes rival the spirit and sublimity of Shakespeare. He will pleasetherefore to compare the phrenzy and the whole sweet character of theJailor's Daughter in the Two Noble Kinsmen to Ophelia in Hamlet,where the copy is so extremely like the original that either the same handdrew both, or Fletcher's is not to be distinguished from Shakespeare's : —To compare the deaths of Pontius and iEcius in Valentinian with that ofCassias, Brutus and their friends in Julius Caesar, and if he admires a* littleless, he will weep much more; it more excels in the pathetic than it fallsshort in dignity: — To compare the character and passions of Cleopatra inthe False One, to those of Shakespeare's Cleopatra: — ^To compare the Eious deprecations and grief-mingled fury of Edith (upon the murder ofer tather by Rollo, in the Bloody Brother) to the gri^* hnd fury of Mac-duff, upon his wife and children's murder. Our authors will not, we hope,be found light in the scale in any of these instances; though their beam ingeneral fly some little umcardsy it will sometimes at least tug hard for apoise. But be it allowed, that as in diction and sentiment^ so in charac^ters and passions^ Shakespeare in general excels, yet here too a very stronginstance occurs of pre-eminence in our authors. It is Juliana in theDouble Marriage, who, through her whole character y in conjugal fidelity,unshaken constancy and amiable tenderness, even more than rivals thePortia of Shakespeare, and her death not only far excels the others, buteven the most pathetic deat/is that Shakespeare has any where describedor exhibited; King Lear's with Cordelia dead in his arms, most resembles,but by no means equals it; the grief, in this case, only pushes an old maninto the grave, already half buried with age and misfortunes; in the other,it is such consummate horror, as in a few minutes freezes youth and beautyinto a monumental statue. The last parallel I shall mention, shall giveShakespeare his due preference, where our authors very visibly ertiulatebut cannot reach him. It is the quarrel of Amintor and Melaritius in theMaid's Tragedy compared to that of Brutus and Cassius. The beginningof the quarrel is upon as just grounds, and the passions are wrought upto as great violence, but there is not such extreme dignity of character,VOL. L f nor xxxir MR. SEWARD'S PREFACE. nor such noble sentiments of morality in either Amintor or Melantius asin Brutus.' Having thus given, we hope, pretty strong proofs of our authors excel-lence in the sublime, and shewn how near they approach in splendor to the5redt sun of the British Theatre ; let us now just touch on their comedies andraw one parallel of a very different kind. Horace makes a doubt whe-ther comedy should be called poetry or not, t. e. whether the comedies ofTerence, Plautus, Menander, &c. should be esteemed such, for in its ownnature there is a comic poetic diction as well as a tragic one; a dictionwhich Horace himself was a great master of, though it had not then beenused in the drama; for even the sublimest sentiments of Terence, whenhis comedy raises its voice to the greatest dignity, are still not clothed inpoetic diction. The British drama which before Jonson received onlysome little improvement from the models of Greece and Rome, but sprungchiefly from tneir own moralities, and religious farces; and had a birth ex-tremely similar to what the Grecian drama originally sprung from ; dif-fered in its growth from the Greeks chiefly in two particulars. The latterseparated the solemn parts of their religious shews from the satiric farcicalparts of them, and so formed the distmct species of tragedy and comedy;''the Britons were not so happy, but suffered them to continue united, evenin hands of as great or greater poets than Sophocles and Euripides. Butthey had far better success in the second instance. The Greeks appropriatedthe spirit and nerves of poetry to tragedy only, and though they aid notwholly deprive the comedy of metre, tney left it not the shadow of poeticdiction and sentiment; " Idcirco quidam, comcedia necne poemaEsset, quasivire : Quod acer spiritus ac visNee verbis nee rebus inest.** The Britons not only retained metre in their comedies, but also all the acerspiritus, all the strength and nerves of poetry, which was in a good measureowing to the happiness of our blank verse, which at the same time that itis capable of the highest sublimity, the inost extensive and noblest Aarmonyof the tragic and epic; yet when used familiarly is so near the sermopedes^tris, so easy and natural as to be well adapted even to the drollest comicdialogue. The French common metre is the very reverse of this; it ismuch too stiff and formal either for tragedy or comedy, unable to rise with ' One key to Amintor's heroism and distress, will, I believe, solve all the objections thathave been raised to this scene ; which will vanish at once by only an occasional cof{formityto our authors ethical and political principles. They held passive obedience and non-resistanceto princes an indispensable duty; a doctrine which Queen Elizabeth's goodness niade hersubjects fond of imbibing, and which her successor's king-craft, with tar different views,carried to its highest pitch. In this peritxl, our authors wrote, and we may as well quarrelwith Tasso for Popery, or with Homer and Virgil for Heathenism, as with our authors forthis principle. It is therefore the violent shocks of the highest provocations strugglingwith what Amintor thought his eternal duty -, of nature rebelling against principle (a<} a fa*mous partisan for this doctrine in Queen Ann's reign expressed it, wnen he happened not tobe in the ministry) which drive the heroic youth into that phrenzy, which makes him chal-lenge his dearest friend for espousing too revengefully his own quarrel against the sacred ma-jesty of the most abandonedly wicked king. The same key is necessary to the heroism ofiEcius, Aubrey, Archas, and many others of our author's characters; in all which the readerwill perhaps think, there is something unnaturally absurd; but the absurdity is wholly•hargeable on Uie doctrine not on the poets, . proper
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