There is nothing in the Greek tragedians equalling, in sublime simplicity, the song of the Fates,-

"Es fürchte die Götter

Das Menschengeschlecht!"-U. S. W.

It is no slight praise of Mr. Serjeant Talfourd, to admit that his play is not utterly thrown into the shade by one of the master-pieces of this great prince of all the poets of his time.

The decline of the stage in England is not to be regretted on any ground, whether of morality or taste. There was a time when it was the custom to talk of the stage as holding up the mirror to vice, and so forth. Upon the strength of this doctrine, for the purpose it would seem of looking at themselves in this moral mirror, many of the most abandoned characters in this vast city assemble nightly at the theatres. The truth is the stage, ever since the Restoration, has been and still is a school of profaneness, immorality and bad taste. The plays written during the earlier part of the eighteenth century, to which Madame de Stael alluded when she said, "Rien ne ressemble moins aux Anglais que leur comedie," still maintain their place. The generalisation would not have been too sweeping, if for the word English she had substituted mankind. There is scarcely a pure or noble sentiment to be found among the great

majority of these writers, the very refuse of our literature; witty, indeed, 'some of them certainly are, but indecency and low trickery, the easiest and most common-place mode of amusing the vulgar, are their staple, and when they mean to be moral they are only preeminently insipid.

But Shakspeare still maintains his popularity. Shakspeare, it is true, is as perfect a dramatist as he is a poet; his situations tell scenically even without the assistance of his matchless language. He reigns on the stage as a dramatist only, not as a poet; the actors mangle his text in the most villainous way, and some of them have had the ineffable conceit to believe they could improve him. In the beautiful concluding scene of the Winter's Tale, Leontes rapturously exclaims,

"If this be magic, let it be an art

Lawful as eating."

A stage copy I once saw alters it to

"Sacred as religion!"

translating into the mawkish vernacular of the stage the natural raciness of the poet. To this day it is Dryden's Tempest, not Shakspeare's, which is acted. I remember at Vienna seeing Macbeth translated by Schiller acted line for line as Schiller wrote it; the German actors had more sense than to

suppose themselves greater poets than Schiller and Shakspeare. But who in this country ever saw Shakspeare acted as Shakspeare wrote? Milton's Comus has been travestied for the use of the stage in like manner. The reform of the stage would

seem to he hopeless.

This chapter has been extended to a somewhat disproportionate length. It may be inferred from the whole that the object of poetry is not directly morality, nor yet truth, but beauty in every form, and in the most comprehensive sense. To the developement of beauty all other matters are, poetically speaking, subsidiary; yet how mighty is the force of this word! It embraces all the glories not only of the external or physical, but of the internal or imaginative world, brighter and serener far. Redeeming whatever is mean and vile, it contemplates humanity under every aspect of interest, whether it be, to borrow an illustration from sculpture, the passion of Laocoon, the grace of Venus, or the majesty of Apollo. Immoral, beauty cannot be, for immorality is a disturbing force, violating the repose of harmony. Hence it is that to poetry, as the most comprehensive and plastic of the beautiful arts, all ages have attributed something divine. It has served as a medium for transmitting to later generations the most ancient histories and the most ancient laws; and gratifying equally both the

imagination and the reason, and impressing itself firmly on the memory, it has been chosen by Infinite Wisdom, as a ministering spirit, to convey to mankind the most vital truths of Religion.

139

OF UTILITARIANISM.

Nihil tam metuens, quàm ne dubitare aliquâ de re videretur. Cicero de Naturâ Deorum.

The mixture of those things by speech which by nature are divided, is the mother of all error.-Hooker.

To those, and their number is not small, in whose eyes Utilitarianism and Utilitarians, Bentham, Benthamese and Benthamites, are an abomination, we say with old Ariosto,

"Lasciate questo cänto, che senz'esso

Può star l'istoria, e non sarà men chiara."

There are at least four reasons for not thinking Mr. Jeremy Bentham* a philosopher. In the first place, he is an habitual sneerer, who can never argue without grinning; secondly, he cannot look at both sides of a question, and seldom sees the whole even of one side; thirdly, he is a dogmatist who denounces all who differ from him; and fourthly, he has false notions of human nature, and thinks

* A new edition of Mr. Bentham's works is now in the course of publication.