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If you'll sit down,

I'll bear your logs the while. Pray give me that,
I'll carry't to the pile.--

-- You look wearily.

It is by selecting such little and almost imperceptible circumstances, that Shakspeare has more truly painted the passions than any other writer: affection is more powerfully expressed by this simple wish and offer of assistance, than by the unnatural eloquence and witticisms of Dryden, or the amorous declamations of Rowe.

The resentment of Prospero for the matchless cruelty and wicked usurpation of his brother; his parental affection and solicitude for the welfare of his daughter, the heiress of his dukedom; and the awful solemnity of his character, as a skilful magician; are all along preserved with equal consistency, dignity, and decorum. One part of his behaviour deserves to be particularly pointed out: during the exhibition of a mask with which he had ordered Ariel to entertain Ferdinand and Miranda, he starts suddenly from the recollection of the conspiracy of Caliban and his confederates against his life, and dismisses his attendant spirits, who instantly vanish to a hollow and confused noise. He appears to be greatly moved; and suitably to this agitation of mind, which his danger has excited, he takes occasion, from the sudden disappearance of the visionary scene, to moralise on the dissolution of all things:

These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits; and

Are melted into air, into thin air.

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

To these noble images he adds a short but comprehensive observation on human life, not excelled by any passage of the moral and sententious Euripides:

We are such stuff

As dreams are made of; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep!

Thus admirably is an uniformity of character, that leading beauty in dramatic poesy, preserved throughout the Tempest. And it may be farther remarked that the unities of action, of place, and of time, are in this play, though almost constantly violated by Shakspeare, exactly observed. The action is one, great, and intire, the restoration of Prospero to his dukedom: this business is transacted in the compass of a small island, and in or near the cave of Prospero; though, indeed, it had been more artful and regular to have confined it to this single spot; and the time which the action takes up is only equal to that of the representation; an excellence which ought always to be aimed at in every well-conducted fable, and for

the want of which a variety of the most entertaining incidents can scarcely atone.'

JOSEPH WARTON."

In regard to the necessity for a strict observance of the unities of time and place, we must here make some allowance for the classical prejudices of Dr. Warton, who has certainly rated their importance much beyond that to which they are entitled. The following remarks of a recent and very sensible critic may be quoted as an excellent corrective of the Doctor's Aristotelian bias. "Of the three unities of action, time, and place," he observes," which Aristotle had deemed indispensable, the first I have always thought important to every composition, as consisting in the relation of every incident to some great action or end; and it is no less necessary to preserve it in epic poetry than in tragedy. It is essential even to history, for the detail of two narratives at once, or the intermixture of them can only serve to confuse.

"The second unity is that of time, which (according to those absurd critics who have merely copied from the imperfect sketches left by the ancients) requires that a play should occupy no more time in the supposed action than it does in the representation. Unity of place, (according to the same prejudiced judges, who never looked at the origin of the prejudice,) required that the scene should be never shifted from one place to another. By observing the first of these, the ancients had great difficulty to find any interesting events which could be supposed to be acted in so short a time; on this account, Aristotle himself, who was a slave to precedent, was obliged to change the time, and allowed them twenty-four hours.

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That they might not violate the third unity, they were obliged to fix their action in some public place, such as a court or area before a palace; on which account much business was transacted there which ought to have been done in private.

"The truth is, these two last unities arose out of the imper

fection of the Greek drama. the curtain was not let down between the acts. Shakspeare understood nature better than those pedantic critics who have extolled the unities of Aristotle; and surely, according to the modern custom, the spectators can, with no degree of violence upon the imagination while the action is suspended, suppose a certain time to elapse between the acts; and by a very small effort of the imagination, they can also suppose themselves transported, or the scene shifted, from one place to another.

As the chorus never left the stage,

"Upon the whole then, it is plain the moderns have judged rightly in laying aside the chorus; and Shakspeare, who rejected the unities of time and place, has produced the best dramas."

Letters on Literature, Taste, and Composition, by George Gregory, D. D. In two volumes, London, 1808. Vol. 2. p. 224, et seq.

I need scarcely remind any reader of Shakspeare that Dr. Johnson, in his admirable preface to his edition of the bard, was one of the first to exert his great critical abilities in support of the licence practised by our poet as to the unities of time and place.

Adventurer, No. 97. October 9, 1753.

No. III.

OBSERVATIONS ON KING LEAR.

ONE of the most remarkable differences betwixt ancient and modern tragedy, arises from the prevailing custom of describing only those distresses that are occasioned by the passion of love; a passion which, from the universality of its dominion, may doubtless justly claim a large share in representations of human life; but which, by totally engrossing the theatre, had contributed to degrade that noble school of virtue into an academy of effeminacy.

When Racine persuaded the celebrated Arnauld to read his Phædra, 'Why,' said that severe critic to his friend, have you falsified the manners of Hippolitus, and represented him in love?'- Alas!' replied the poet, without that circumstance, how would the ladies and the beaux have received my piece? And it may well be imagined, that to gratify so considerable and important a part of his audience, was the powerful motive that induced Corneille to enervate even the matchless and affecting story of Edipus, by the frigid and impertinent episode of Theseus's passion for Dirce.

Shakspeare has shown us, by his Hamlet, Macbeth, and Cæsar, and, above all, by his Lear, that

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