helming influence of strong
passions, and who can calmly enter into an analysis of their own
feelings; but the actors labour to give you the impression, that they
are agitated by present, violent, and sudden emotions; the tragedies are
composed with as much regularity as epic poems in heroic verse, but the
best actors do all in their power, by varied intonation, by irregular
pauses, and frequent bursts of passion, to conceal the rhymes, and break
the uniformity of the measure.

The effect of the rhymes and regular versification, in the mouths of the
inferior actors, who have not the art to conceal them, is, to an English
ear at least, very unpleasing, and indeed almost destructive of
theatrical illusion; and as a number of such actors must necessarily
appear in every tragedy, it may be doubted whether a tragedy is ever
acted throughout on the French stage in so pleasing a manner, at least
to an English taste, as some of our English tragedies are at present in
the London theatres--as Venice preserved, for example, is now acted at
Covent Garden. If such be our superiority, however, it must be ascribed,
not to the tragic genius of the people being greater, but to there being
fewer difficulties to be overcome on the English stage than on the
French.

We think it is pretty clear, likewise, that the style of the best
English tragedies affords a better field for the display of genius in
the actors, than that of the French. Where the sentiments of the
characters introduced are fully expressed in their words--where their
whole thoughts are detailed for the edification of the audience, however
grand or touching these may be, it is obvious, that the actor who is to
represent them is in trammels; the poet has done so much, that little
remains for him; his art is confined to the display of emotions or
passions, all the variations of which are set down for him, and which he
is not permitted to alter. But when the expression of intense feeling is
confined to few words, to broken sentences, and sudden transitions of
thought, which let you, indeed, into the inmost recesses of the soul of
the sufferer, but do not lay it open before you, it is permitted for the
genius of the actor to co-operate with that of the poet in producing an
effect, for which neither was singly competent. Those who have witnessed
the representation of the heart-rendings of jealousy in Kean's Othello,
or of the agonies of "love and sorrow joined" in Miss O'Neil's