THE LITTLE FRENCH LAWYER.

Act i. sc. 1. Dinant's speech :

Are you become a patron too? "Tis a new one,
No more on't, &c.

Seward reads:

Are you become a patron too? How long

Have you been conning this speech? 'Tis a new one, &c.

If conjectural emendation, like this, be allowed, we might venture to read

O miserable! Dinant sees through Cleremont's gravity, and

the actor is to explain it.

struggle of affected morality.

Words are but words,' is the last

Act i. sc. 3.

VALENTINIAN.

Ir is a real trial of charity to read this scene with tolerable temper towards Fletcher. So very slavish-so reptile-are the feelings and sentiments represented as duties. And yet remember he was a bishop's son, and the duty to God was the supposed basis.

Personals, including body, house, home, and religion;-property, subordination, and inter-community;-these are the fundamentals of society. I mean here, religion negatively taken,—so that the person be not compelled to do or utter, in relation of the soul to God, what would be, in that person, a lie ;—such as to force a man to go to church, or to swear that he believes what he does

not believe. Religion, positively taken, may be a great and useful privilege, but can not be a right,—were it for this only that it can not be pre-defined. The ground of this distinction between negative and positive religion, as a social right, is plain. No one of my fellow-citizens is encroached on by my not declaring to him what I believe respecting the super-sensual; but should every man be entitled to preach against the preacher, who could hear any preacher? Now it is different in respect of loyalty. There we have positive rights, but not negative rights;—for every pretended negative would be in effect a positive ;—as if a soldier had a right to keep to himself, whether he would, or would not, fight. Now, no one of these fundamentals can be rightfully attacked, except when the guardian of it has abused it to subvert one or more of the rest. The reason is, that the guardian, as a fluent, is less than the permanent which he is to guard. He is the temporary and mutable mean, and derives his whole value from the end. In short, as robbery is not high treason, so neither is every unjust act of a king the converse. All must be attacked and endangered. Why? Because the king, as a. to A., is a mean to A. or subordination, in a far higher sense than a proprietor, as b. to B. is a mean to B. or property.

Act ii. sc. 2. Claudia's speech:

Chimney-pieces! &c.

The whole of this speech seems corrupt; and if accurately printed,—that is, if the same in all the prior editions, irremediable but by bold conjecture. Till my tackle,' should be, I think, while, &c.

Act iii. sc. 1. B. and F. always write as if virtue or goodness were a sort of talisman, or strange something, that might be lost without the least fault on the part of the owner. In short, their chaste ladies value their chastity as a material thing,—not as an act or state of being; and this mere thing being imaginary, no wonder that all their women are represented with the minds of strumpets, except a few irrational humorists, far less capable of exciting our sympathy than a Hindoo, who has had a basin of cow-broth thrown over him;-for this, though a debasing superstition, is still real, and we might pity the poor wretch, though we can not help despising him. But B. and F.'s Lucinas are clumsy fictions. It is too plain that the authors had no one

idea of chastity as a virtue, but only such a conception as a blind man might have of the power of seeing, by handling an ox's eye. In The Queen of Corinth, indeed, they talk differently; but it is all talk, and nothing is real in it but the dread of losing a reputation. Hence the frightful contrast between their women (even those who are meant for virtuous) and Shakspeare's. So, for instance, The Maid in the Mill:—a woman must not merely have grown old in brothels, but have chuckled over every abomination committed in them with a rampant sympathy of imagination, to have had her fancy so drunk with the minutia of lechery as this icy chaste virgin evinces hers to have been.

It would be worth while to note how many of these plays are founded on rapes,-how many on incestuous passions, and how many on mere lunacies. Then their virtuous women are either crazy superstitions of a mere bodily negation of having been acted on, or strumpets in their imaginations and wishes, or, as in this Maid in the Mill, both at the same time. In the men, the love is merely lust in one direction,-exclusive preference of one object. The tyrant's speeches are mostly taken from the mouths of indignant denouncers of the tyrant's character, with the substitution of 'I' for 'he,' and the omission of the prefatory 'he acts as if he thought' so and so. The only feelings they can possibly excite are disgust at the Aeciuses, if regarded as sane loyalists, or compassion, if considered as Bedlamites. So much for their tragedies. But even their comedies are, most of them, disturbed by the fantasticalness, or gross caricature, of the persons or incidents. There are few characters that you can really like,— (even though you should have erased from your mind all the filth which bespatters the most likable of them, as Piniero in The Island Princess for instance)-scarcely one whom you can love. How different this from Shakspeare, who makes one have a sort of sneaking affection even for his Barnardines;-whose very Iagos and Richards are awful, and by the counteracting power of profound intellects, rendered fearful rather than hateful;—and even the exceptions, as Goneril and Regan, are proofs of superlative judgment and the finest moral tact, in being left utter monsters, nulla virtute redempta, and in being kept out of sight as much as possible, they being, indeed, only means for the excitement and deepening of noblest emotions towards the Lear, Cordelia, &c. and employed with the severest economy! But

even Shakspeare's grossness-that which is really so, independently of the increase in modern times of vicious associations with things indifferent—(for there is a state of manners conceivable so pure, that the language of Hamlet at Ophelia's feet might be a harmless rallying, or playful teasing, of a shame that would exist in Paradise)—at the worst, how diverse in kind is it from Beaumont and Fletcher's! In Shakspeare it is the mere generalities of sex, mere words for the most part, seldom or never distinct images, all head-work, and fancy-drolleries; there is no sensation supposed in the speaker. I need not proceed to contrast this with B. and F.

ROLLO.

THIS is, perhaps, the most energetic of Fletcher's tragedies. He evidently aimed at a new Richard III. in Rollo;-but as in all his other imitations of Shakspeare, he was not philosopher enough to bottom his original. Thus, in Rollo, he has produced a mere personification of outrageous wickedness, with no fundamental characteristic impulses to make either the tyrant's words. or actions philosophically intelligible. Hence the most pathetic. situations border on the horrible, and what he meant for the terrible, is either hateful, tò μioŋtòv, or ludicrous. The scene of Baldwin's sentence in the third act is probably the grandest working of passion in all B. and F.'s dramas ;-but the very magnificence of filial affection given to Edith, in this noble scene, renders the after-scene-(in imitation of one of the least Shaksperian of all Shakspeare's works, if it be his, the scene between Richard and Lady Anne)-in which Edith is yielding to a few words and tears, not only unnatural, but disgusting. In Shakspeare, Lady Anne is described as a weak, vain, very woman throughout.

Act i. sc. 1.

Gis. He is indeed the perfect character

Of a good man, and so his actions speak him.

This character of Aubrey, and the whole spirit of this and several other plays of the same authors, are interesting as traits of the morals which it was fashionable to teach in the reigns of James I. and his successor, who died a martyr to them. Stage,

pulpit, law, fashion,-all conspired to enslave the realm. Massinger's plays breathe the opposite spirit; Shakspeare's the spirit of wisdom which is for all ages. By-the-by, the Spanish dramatists-Calderon, in particular,-had some influence in this respect, of romantic loyalty to the greatest monsters, as well as in the busy intrigues of B. and F.'s plays.

THE WILDGOOSE CHASE.

Act ii. sc. 1. Belleur's speech :—

-That wench, methinks,

If I were but well set on, for she is a fable,

If I were but hounded right, and one to teach me.

SYMPSON reads 'affable,' which Colman rejects, and says, 'the next line seems to enforce' the reading in the text.

Pity, that the editor did not explain wherein the sense, seemingly enforced by the next line,' consists. May the true word be a sable,' that is, a black fox, hunted for its precious fur? Or at-able,' -as we now say,' she is come-at-able?'

A WIFE FOR A MONTH.

Act iv. sc. 1. Alphonso's speech :—

Betwixt the cold bear and the raging lion
Lies my safe way.

Seward's note and alteration to

"Twixt the cold bears, far from the raging lion

THIS Mr. Seward is a blockhead of the provoking species. In his itch for correction, he forgot the words' lies my safe way!' The Bear is the extreme pole, and thither he would travel over the space contained between it and the raging lion.'