twelve years since, by the late Mr Hodson, fellow of one of the Cambridge colleges, and author of the tragedy Zoraida, a man of considerable talents and scholastic reputation. He pronounces that the limits, as to time, ought not to exceed twenty-four hours; but, if they exceed the time of the performance at all, limiting restraint is useless, is pernicious. Useless, because it is impossible to lose the consciousness that the play is a representation, not a reality. Pernicious, because it is seldom, indeed, that such a small portion of ex- ` istence can supply events, which place the persons of the drama in those varied and contrasting situations, which shew the characters in different points of view, as acting under the influence of dissimilar circumstances and passions.

Mr Hodson had studied Shakespeare so little as to observe that, finely as he has written, " his plays would have possessed still greater superiority had he observed the rules of Aristotle."

All who feel Shakespeare's excellence, and examine the causes of his infinitely surpassing powers, respecting all other dramatic writers, Greek, Roman, French, German, and English, in the representation of life, of the passions, and manners, will feel that his disdain of those rules is not an error to be pardoned on the score of his poetic and characteristic recompenses, but one powerful

ly operative means by which he acquired his confessed transcendence. Could he have been engaged to have new-modelled his Macbeth in an approach to the restraints of the unities, as to time and place, observe what it must have lost;the heath-scene; the banquet-scene; the cavescene; the castle-scene, and its siege,—with all their animating changes, all the characteristic varieties, all the poetic sublimities resulting from situations of such inspiriting difference!—all lopt and lost; while, for the business of one evening, and even for an elapse of twenty-four hours, what superfluous speeches, what spun-out declamation, must have been made to have dragged the murder of Duncan through five acts? Then the admirable moral sacrificed, which results from the gradual progression of vice in the character of Macbeth;—a mind, once great and noble, proceeding to the last excesses of superfluous cruelty. That could not naturally happen in the course of twenty-four hours.

Who can ponder these things, and, if they write plays, not wish to avail themselves of an example so pregnant with dramatic advantages! Besides, it is known that Aristotle formed his rules upon the preceding examples of the Greek poets. Let modern critics do the same; and, since we have

an infinitely greater dramatic writer than Menander, Sophocles, Eschylus, or Euripides, boldly assert that truth demonstrated by the effect of his plays, that all limits, as to time or place, are not only superfluous, but inimical to the theatric representation of human life, character, and man

ners.

You say you would not vainly attempt to imitate Shakespeare. Servile imitation is disgraceful; but there is neither servility nor vanity in observing and in using the means by which great writers attain their purposes. Why should not the poet, as well as the painter, work after the best models?

I wonder to hear you expressing contempt for translations, since you are conscious that Dryden's finest poems, the ode excepted, are translations from Boccace and Chaucer; that Shakespeare did not disdain to adopt, not only the stories, but the thoughts and images which he found in the ballads and novels from whence he formed his plays; that, in his historic dramas, he took much from Plutarch and our own old historians.

Mr T. Warton has shewn us the outlines of the Paradise Lost in an Italian play; and of Comus, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso, in the works of poets who preceded Milton half a century.

If these circumstances had been considered, you would not have said that little credit can arise from translations, or from working upon the crude materials of others. Oh! how much credit has resulted to his fame, who first made the Iliad an English poem of exquisite interest and beauty!— Adieu!

LETTER XXXVI.

F. N. C. MUNDY, ESQ.

Lichfield, April 30, 1799.

PERMIT me to express my very flattered sense of the honour conferred on my late publication by your charming sonnet*. It is truly Miltonic.

* On Miss SEWARD's Sonnets, with particular allusion to her Twenty-first and Twenty-second.

CRITIC, hast thou fastidiously proclaim'd,

Misjudging from such humble verse as mine,
The lyre's lost energy, the sad decline

Of genius in this island, early nam'd

Self out of the question, had a superior muse been its object, I should admire it as poetry; yet permit me to enter my protest against the second line. It is unworthy the author of one of the most beautiful local poems in our language, not to feel the high poetic ground on which he stands. Leave to poetasters the humility which well becomes their meagre pretensions.

I have always remonstrated with Mr Hayley against that sort of self-injustice. In some verses of invitation, which he once sent to Gibbon, and afterwards injudiciously published in his Miscellany, he compares the Roman historian to the eagle, and himself to the sparrow, who would chirp his welcome to the imperial bird. Gibbon, who was perhaps little conversant with poetry, and therefore unable to perceive that Mr Hayley had, at least, an equal claim with himself to the

In classic heraldry, and foremost fam'd?

From Greece, from Latium, came th' impatient Nine,

Here to revive their laurels, and entwine

Their shoots; rewards of Envy only blam'd.And here they still rejoice; here still abides Imagination in her mountains strong;

While Harmony beneath her stream divides.
And thou shalt blush, vain critic, for thy wrong

Tasting these sweets which the Queen Muse provides,
With rarest elegauce of sex and song.