from Kotzebue rather than from Lessing,
Schiller and Goethe--he showed a very imperfect acquaintance with a
complicated literary movement which was obliquely reflected in the
stage-plays of Iffland and his contemporaries. The change which was
coming over English literature was in truth of a wider and deeper nature
than it was possible for even one of its chief representatives to
perceive. As that literature freed itself from the fetters so long worn
by it as indispensable ornaments, and threw aside the veil which had so
long obscured both the full glory of its past and the lofty capabilities
of its future, it could not resort except tentatively to a form which
like the dramatic is bound by a hundred bonds to the life of the age
itself. Soon, the poems with which Scott and Byron, and the unrivalled
prose fictions with which Scott, both satisfied and stimulated the
imaginative demands of the public, diverted the attention of the
cultivated classes from dramatic literature, which was unable to escape,
with the light foot of verse or prose fiction, into "the new, the
romantic land." New themes, new ideas, new forms occupied a new
generation of writers and readers; nor did the drama readily lend itself
as a vessel into which to pour so many fermenting elements. In Byron the
impressions produced upon a mind not less open to impulses from without
than subjective in its way of recasting them, called forth a series of
dramatic attempts betraying a more or less wilful ignorance of the
demands of dramatic compositions; his beautiful _Manfred_, partly
suggested by Goethe's _Faust_, and his powerful _Cain_, have but the
form of plays; his tragedies on Italian historical subjects show some
resemblance in their political rhetoric to the contemporary works of
Alfieri; his _Sardanapalus_, autobiographically interesting, fails to
meet the demands of the stage; his _Werner_ (of which the authorship has
been ascribed to the duchess of Devonshire) is a hastily dramatized
sensation novel. To Coleridge (1772-1834), who gave to English
literature a splendidly loose translation of Schiller's _Wallenstein_,
the same poet's _Robbers_ (to which Wordsworth's only dramatic attempt,
the _Borderers_, is likewise indebted) had probably suggested the
subject of his tragedy of _Osorio_, afterwards acted under the title of
_Remorse_. Far superior to this is his later drama of _Zapolya_, a
genuine homage to Shakespeare, out of the themes of two of whose play