line or in the touches by which it is thus sought to be animated; and the traits that are lent to it in this style of high pretension, are borrowed, for the most part, from the most obvious and commonplace accompaniments of their leading qualities: and though there was some merit, as well as some boldness, in following Shakspeare so very closely, as to send her ambitious usurper, after the example of his Macbeth, to consult with witches in a cavern, we think it was any thing but ingenious or original to make a bloody tyrant swear outrageously at his servant for having mislaid his armour; or to intimate to us the playful and kindly nature of a distressed damsel, by letting us know, in heavy blank verse, that she had stopped in the lobby to pat the head of a hound that came fawning to be caressed by her. The great fault, however, of all her characters is, that they are evidently mere generalisations of a few obvious and familiar attributes-mere theoretical personages, compounded systematically out of a certain assemblage of qualities supposed to be striking or dramatic, without giving us the impression of there being any actual individual to whom they belong, and whose existence might be conceived as distinct from those qualities. This magical art, indeed, seems to have been possessed in its highest perfection by Shakspeare alone; who, when he had once conjured up, from the vasty depths of his own boundless imagination, such potent spirits as Hotspur or Hamlet, Mercutio or Falstaff, appears to have been actually haunted by their ideal presence, and so fully impressed with a sense of their reality, as not only to have seen without effort all that such persons could do or say in the business which they had been called up to perform, but actually to have been unable to confine them to that business, or to restrain them from following out their characteristic impulses into all kinds of accidental and capricious excesses. Miss Baillie, however, is in no danger of being thus overmastered by the phantoms of her own creation; who are so far from appearing to have a being independent of her control, or an activity which she cannot repress, that it is with difficulty that they get through the work which is set before them, or that the reader can conceive of them as any thing else than the limited and necessary causes of the phenomena which they produce. This, however, is a fault by no means peculiar to Miss Baillie; and one of which we should scarcely have thought ourselves bound to take any notice, if she had not insisted so largely upon the necessity of attending to the delineation of character, and brought forward the traits of her own in a way so obtrusive, as to show very plainly that she thought her pretensions in this department proof against any sort of scrutiny. For the same reason, we think it our duty to say, further, that besides this want of the talent of giving individuality to her scenic personages, it appears to us that she is really disqualified from representing the higher characters of the tragic drama, by an obvious want of sympathy or admiration for such characters. Every reader of plays, and indeed of poetry, or works of imagination in general, must have observed, that there were certain characters, or qualities of mind, which were favourites with each particular author, and in the delineation of which he was consequently peculiarly spirited and successful. Even the universal Shakspeare, to whom the observation is infinitely less applicable than to any other mortal, obviously luxuriates most in his representation of original humour and comic eccentricity. Otway has a decided predilection for scenes of tenderness and pathos-Beaumont and Fletcher for romantic extravagance of love or bravery-Milton for austere and lofty morality-and Dryden for pomp and magnificence. Each of these authors

has, accordingly, succeeded eminently only in those characters to which they were most partial;-and scarcely any of them (except the first) has produced any striking delineation of an opposite character. Now, Miss Baillie has her favourite character also; and one which, though it do infinite credit to her judgment and feeling as an individual, happens unfortunately to be, of all others, perhaps the very worst adapted for dramatic or tragic representation. It is impossible, we think, to read any one of her plays, without feeling that the character which Miss Baillie thinks (and with great. reason) the most amiable and engaging of all others, is that of cheerful good sense, united to calm, equable, and indulgent affections,-the character, in short, of rationality and habitual benevolence;-of which we think it must be admitted that, whatever precedence it may claim over more brilliant qualifications in real life, it is just as ill fitted to give spirit and effect to the fictions of the drama, as the qualities that shine most there are to soothe the moments of domestic privacy.

Every one of Miss Baillie's amiable characters, however, both male and female, leans visibly to this class of virtues. They are all marvellously dutiful and affectionate towards their near relations, and careful of the comforts of their servants and immediate dependants. They are laudably tolerant, too, of bad jokes proceeding from good hearts; and live in the practice of a sort of innocent gibing and good-natured raillery, which shows. their disposition to be merry, and does no harm to any body. They are considerable despisers, moreover, of power and glory, and the other splendid illusions to which the less sober part of mankind are in the habit of sacrificing their happiness,-and much disposed to console themselves for the want of those turbulent enjoyments, by the solid comforts of content and a good conscience. Now, it is plain enough, we suppose, that these respectable and well-disposed persons are not very likely to excite a great interest by their appearances in tragedy: both on account of the very homeliness of their virtues, and of their not being at all the sort of persons either to perform the actions or to experience the emotions upon which the effect of that kind of moral tale is commonly thought to depend.

The fact is, however, that they are equally unfit for comedy; and it is chiefly to the excess of her very laudable predilection for them, that we are to ascribe Miss Baillie's uniform and admitted failure in this department of the drama. All her amiable personages are too reasonable, prudent, and placable, to excite any greast interest or anxiety in their behalf; and the unamiable ones are little more than unreasonable, or ill-tempered-without ceasing to be tolerably sensible, and nearly as plain in their speech, and as sagacious in pursuit of their objects, as their more unexceptionable associates. The truth is, however, that Miss Baillie has no talent for writing comedy: she does not appear to us to comprehend in what the vis comica consists, or to have an idea that there ought to be amusing passages in a work in¬ tended for amusement: she has no gift, certainly, in devising or unfolding a story; and here her personages all go through their parts in such a sober and business-like manner, there is so little of extravagance in any one character -so little spontaneous wit or discursive humour-such an entire absence, in short, of brilliant or ornamental writing, that one would almost imagine that she held the laws of good taste to be the same for a comedy as for a sermon;nor could we have at all explained the phenomenon of her continual failure, if we had not recollected her constant and excessive partiality for the moderately cheerful and very reasonable persons we have just alluded to,-out

of love and deference for whom she seems to have settled it with herself, that the gaiety of comedy should never rise above the tone of good-humoured conversation among plain and ordinary people; and should never be pursued any farther than such worthy persons are in the practice of letting their jokes carry them from their business. The brilliancy and extravagance of fancy that fascinate more frivolous beings, appear to her, we have no doubt, very fatiguing and unprofitable,-and we are afraid that she may even look upon the amplifications of Falstaff and the sallies of Mercutio or Benedict as mere raving and folly, and on the turns and repartees of Congreve and Sheridan as impertinent interruptions to the business of the play. It is certain, at least, that her comedies show a great deal of good sense, and a plentiful lack of wit; and we think we adopt a most charitable theory, when we ascribe to her predilection for that substarial quality, their desiciency in a more appropriate ornament.

The passions, as to what relates to the drama, really are not very distinguishable from the characters; and the most of what we have now said as to the latter, is applicable therefore to them also. We must observe, however, that, in her later works especially, Miss Baillie has presented us rather with a theoretical amplification of the progress of a passion in general, than with its natural expression in the character of any one individual. The elaborate purpose of tracing it through all its gradations, and investing it with all its attributes, is by far too manifest throughout. Our attention, in short, is directed more to its anatomy than to its living action; and we rise from the perusal, even of her most successful attempts, with a consciousness rather of having been instructed in the nature of the passion in question, than of having witnessed its natural operation, or been made to sympathise with its victims.

We come now to the last chapter of this fair writer's offences, or those which relate to the matter of style and diction; which we are concerned to say, appears to us the heaviest of the whole; not, however, so much because her taste is bad, as because her stock is deplorably scanty. Almost all the words she has, she has borrowed from our old dramatists; but her credit with them seems to have been so limited, that her debt is incredibly small; and the leading character of her style, therefore, is a poorness and narrowness of diction altogether without example, we think, in this voluble age,-and only rendered more conspicuous by the constrained and unnatural air produced by her affectation of antiquated phraseology, and the contrast which this affords to the carelessness, copiousness, and freedom of the true old style, which is thus brought to our recollection. She seems to have no ear for the melody of blank verse,-and especially of that easy and colloquial verse which is alone suited to the purposes of the drama;-while her words continually remind us of Shakspeare, or Beaumont and Fletcher, it is impossible to imagine any thing so utterly opposite as the richness, lightness, and flexibility of their style, and the poverty and cumbrousness of hersexcept, perhaps, the heavy, lifeless, and unwieldy structure of her verses, when compared with the light and capricious undulations of theirs.

We do not see much merit in using an antiquated diction on any occasion, and least of all in the drama,-where the great object is to copy living nature to the satisfaction of living judges. Whatever beauty such a style may possess, however, must obviously be derived from its tendency to remind us of the beauties of those memorable authors who wrote in it before it had acquired the character of antiquity; and the first rule for the

use of it should therefore be, that it should be the style of their beautiful passages; and that no old word should be admitted in a modern poem, which does not hold a conspicuous station in some admired verse of an ancient one. But, though even our milliners have sense enough to copy only Queen Mary's cap, or Queen Elizabeth's ruff, and not their tremendous stays, or their stockings of woollen cloth, our literary artisans have not yet attained to the same degree of discrimination. The Spectator takes notice, we think, of a play which professed, in his day, to be written in the very style of Shakspeare, upon the strength of its containing this line-" and so good morrow to you, good master lieutenant :" and the public, in our own time, very nearly swallowed an incredible quantity of trash, under the name of the same great author, upon no other inducement, that we could discover, than that all the words were spelled with a double allowance of consonants. Miss Baillie has not gone quite so far as this; but she has sinned perpetually against the canon which we have presumed to lay down for the legitimate use of an obsolete phraseology: she has not copied any of Shakspeare's fine expressions; and has almost always used the style of his age, only where it was less dignified and less intelligible than that of her own. A noble knight, for instance, instead of saying that a painful recollection wounds him deeply, always takes care to say," In faith, it galls me shrewdly;"-and another wishes his adversary's conscience, in like manner," to gnaw him shrewdly." Then all the personages are uniformly "full glad," and "full sorry," and "full well," and "full ready;"-and all the coats, hats, and armour in the volume (which, by the way, pass under the elegant appellation of geer) are invariably "doffed" and "donned" by their wearers;-and the author's good simple people generally "trow" what other people believe; and those who are reprimanded or checked are still said to be" shent." We took the liberty to rebuke Miss Baillie, on a former occasion, for the frequent use of this paltry and affected word; but, in spite of all our pains, we have it here again in the very first play in the volume-where, by way of apology for its re-appearance, we find it used by one noble baron who likens another to "a shent cur" barking at its master's door!

What makes all this the more lamentable is, that Miss Baillie is very obviously by no means an expert or learned archaiologist; and not only uses these and such like very scurvy and sore-worn fragments of old speech incorrectly and injudiciously, but mixes them up, in a most unseemly manner, with the meanest and most unpoetical neologisms. The same chieftain who is "shrewdly galled" in one page, talks of "sombre banishment" in the next; and after bidding" God wot" that he was aware of his son's defects, immediately observes, that

66 ne'ertheless

He still has parts and talents; though obscured
By some untoward failings."

And a fair lady, who has been speaking of "geer," and "clutching," and "harness," and "torn hose," presently exclaims, in the most business-like and peremptory manner, that,

"In short, she would, without another's leave,
Improve the low condition of her peasants.""

It is needless, however, to multiply examples of this low and discordant style at present; because this and all its other peculiarities will be more copiously and fairly illustrated by the specimens which we may be induced,

for other purposes, to extract from the volume before us. But we cannot leave even this general view of the subject without observing, that, either from mere want of words, or from a strange misconception of the style and licence of our older writers, Miss Baillie has indulged herself very frequently in a manner of writing that could not have been endured at any period, and of which it may be fairly said, that it is neither verse nor language at all. She has a habit, in particular, of transposing the substantive and auxiliary verbs in a way that is exceedingly distressing; and certainly would not be tolerated in a schoolboy's first copy of English verses. The reader may conjecture what effect it has on the general air of her composition, when he is informed, that the following instances of it have forced themselves on our notice, in turning over the leaves of the first play in this volume for a very different purpose :

The effect of these "most lame and impotent conclusions" on the melody of the verse, is scarcely less deplorable than their cruel operation on the sense; but the truth is, that the melody of Miss Baillie's blank verse is not to be hurt by trifles-there being nothing in the whole range of modern poetry half so clumsy and untuneful as the greater part of her unrhymed versification.

We will not, however, pursue the ungrateful theme of her faults any farther; but, before closing this hasty and unintended sketch of her poetical character, shall add a word or two, as both duty and inclination prompt us to do, on the more pleasing subject of her merits. And here we must give the first place, we believe, to the tone of good sense and amiable feeling which pervades every part of her performances; and which, wherever they are found to be habitual and unaffected, impart a charm, even to poetical compositions, which compensates for the want of many more splendid attributes. Miss Baillie is not only very moral, and intelligently moral; but there is, in all her writings, a character of indulgent and vigilant affection for her species, and of a goodness that is both magnanimous and practical, which we do not know that we have traced, in the same degree, in the compositions of any other writer. Then she has a very considerable knowledge of human nature, and an uncommon talent of representing (though not in the best dramatical form) the peculiar symptoms and natural developement of various passions; so that her plays may always be read with a certain degree of instruction,-and cannot be read without feelings of great