rew a dainty, fastidious, easily-loathing taste, betokening
that the robust health of the older day--its healthy hunger, and its blood
glowing and bounding like a forester's--was gone by. Never to come again?
No! not so bad as that. We mark main lines. We have not room for the
filling-up. The last century closing, opened another Age, and we of to-day
renovate and reinvigorate ourselves the best we may.

England surely did not bring up the Heroic Tragedy on its unsown soil. It
was foreign falsehood that overcame English truth and sincerity. A
factitious excitement that induced a false pitch throughout. On the old
French stage, there were these two eminent characteristics of tragedy:
Whatever the subject--if OEdipus, and the Plague raging--there must be a
love-tale; and the most impassioned persons most continually dissert.
Generally, Dryden's heroic plays have these two marks--both disnaturings
of tragedy. We conceive in Dryden's age, and in himself as participant, a
pampered taste that cannot relish the wholesome simple meats which Nature,
"good cateress," provides for her beloved, healthy, naturally-living
children. That is to say, a vitiation of taste, by indulged excesses; the
wine and high feasting of their own theatre--which really made them unapt
for understanding Shakspeare. For in such things men understand by force
of delight, and if delight deserts them intelligence does too. The
writings of the great creative poets--of Homer, Dante, Chaucer, and the
rest--always give you the impression that they possessed nature by
observation and sympathy--outward nature and man's nature--that this, as
it were, stood in their soul--the great perpetually-present original--from
which they drew fancifully varied portraiture. It is there as their
standard of reference, when they read other poets. In Dryden, it is not
so. You know neither what he draws from, nor to what he refers in those
extraordinary heroic tragedies which resemble nothing--no men and no
women, that were, are, or shall be. The impossible hero, the impossible
heroine, and their extravagant sentiments, afford scope for a strife and a
torture of thought, which is an inseparable medley of wit and
argumentation; wit reasoning, and logic jesting; a strange confusion of
mental actions, with an unfavourable result; for this result is neither
TRUTH nor MIRTH; but very CHIMERA--changing colour like the
chameleon--shape like the clouds, and substance like the contents of an