th a very abrupt pull-up from other causes; it has been my
fatality more than once or twice, as you will ere long see, to drop upon
other people's topics--for who can find any thing new under the
sun?--and I had already been mentally delivered of divers fag-ends of
speeches, stinging dialogues, and choice tit-bits of scenes, (all of
which I will mercifully spare you,) when a chance peep into Johnson's
'_Lives of the Poets_' showed me mine own fine subject as the work of
some long-forgotten bard! This moral earthquake demolished in a moment
my goodly aerial fabric; the fair plot burst like a meteor; and an
after-recollection of a certain French tragedy-queen, Agrippina, showed
me that the ground was still further preoccupied. But it is high time to
tell the destined name of my abortive play; in four letters, then,

NERO;

A CLASSICAL TRAGEDY:

IN SEVEN SCENES.

And now, in pity to an afflicted parent, hear for a while his
offspring's Roscian capabilities. First of all, however, (and you know
how I rejoice in all things preliminary,) let me clear my road by
explanations: we must pioneer away a titular objection, "in seven
scenes," and an assumed merit, in the term "classical." I abhor
scene-shifters; at least, their province lies more among pantomimes,
farces, and comedies, than in the region of the solemn tragic muse; her
incidents should rather partake of the sculpture-like dignity of
_tableaux_. My unfashionable taste approves not of a serious story being
cut up into a vast number of separate and shuffled sections; and the
whistle and sliding panels detract still more from the completeness of
illusion: I incline as much as is possible to the Classic unities of
time, place, and circumstances, wishing, moreover, every act to be a
scene, and every scene an act; with a comfortable green curtain, that
cool resting-place for the haggard eye, to be the grass-like drop,
mildly alternating with splendid crime and miserable innocence: away
with those gaudy intermediates, and, still worse, some intruded ballet;
bring back Garrick's baize, and crush the dynasty of head-aches.

But onward: let me further extenuate the term, seven scenes; the
utterance seven "acts" would sound horrific, full of extremities of
weariness; but my meaning actually is none other than seven acts of one
scene each: for the number seven, there always have been decent reasons,
and ours may best appear as we proceed, less than a brief seven seeming
in