THE LION'S HEAD. Frank Stanley is requested to accept our thanks, the only return we can make for the trouble he has taken. Scriptor's paper is too heavy,-it cost 4s. 7d. an ounce from Liverpool. We look for very light articles from anonymous contributors who forget to pay the postage. Vindex should have had an answer last month, but the matter quite slipped out of our Head. His paper lies for him at our publishers'. The three Sonnets translated from the Italian are scarcely good enough for our acceptance. We would rather receive tolerable originals than bad translations. Minor's "Conflagration," exhibits some power, but it is too unequal for us to give more than extracts. Sometimes, indeed, his "words that burn" go a step on the other side of the sublime: Blazing, it threaten'd to light up the morn, And hiss'd all watery attempts to scorn: As they had burn'd themselves and roar'd with pain ; Uprose the ruddy smoke in lurid rolls, As fiery dragons had belch'd forth their souls; And flocks of glowing fragments forced on high, We really did not know before that "Juvenile was handed down to posterity as an author much read by the Romans." He was, no doubt, the Mr. Newbery of their day. For this information we are indebted to Bs, and not less so for his candour in pointing out one fault in our Magazine, that " the London is too full of Literature." We are glad it is no worse, and have no doubt that, with Bs's assistance, we shall be able, when necessary, to ren der it quite otherwise. Centaur on Riding seems to have been inspired by the King's Mews. If he had as much of it as Charles at Charing-cross, he would be glad to feel his own feet again. Riding, however (we do not mean C.'s paper), is a very good exercise. 1. H. H.'s Letters from L are clever but dangerous. They are so sprinkled with private anecdote, that we should be obliged to print many passages in asterisks, to avoid other risks more easily understood. We wish that I. H. H. before he writes again, would consider what Winifred Jenkins says: "If God had not given me a good stock of discretion, what a power of things might I not reveal concerning young Mistress and old Mistress." The following is almost the only extract of his paper which we can give with safety: We have the Judges here trumpeting up and down the streets like a couple of recruiting officers. And the country ladies are so bewitched with the causes at Nisi Prius, that they sit there all day, fanning themselves red, over an action on a Bill of Exchange. O! the pleasures of the assize! The black cap, the javelin men, the hanging sentence, the Sheriff's ball! You who live at London, and those distant parts, have no more idea of the splendours of our place at such a time, than W has of Quadrilles. Mrs. Sup the town has been robbed of a gravy spoon, and no one has yet discovered the robberso that we all live in blessed fear of a penny Marr, or a twopenny Williamson. We make the most of every thing. If the thief transpires, you shall hear. We are indebted to the kindness of various hands for the following, which we cannot mention in any other way:-The Murderer's Dream, and Sonnet by H. L.-To a Lady on her Birth-day, and Verses, by W. H. C.-Song, by J. H.-On Oaths.-Song, by W. C.-Song, by T. W.-Z. A.-Sonnet, by J. A. G.-M. M.-Verax.-" Feet and Heels."-Plutarch, jun. Several Correspondents who desire private answers, will receive them on application at our Publishers'. THE artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage. Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years only to be exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear them. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occasional licence of dialogue? I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw every thing up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to the point of strict morality) and take it all for truth. We substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. We try him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis persona, his peers. We have been spoiled with-not sentimental comedy-but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all-devouring drama of common life; where the moral point is every thing; where, instead of the VOL. V. fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy); we recognise ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, ene-, mies,-the same as in life,-with an interest in what is going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot af ford our moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment. What is there transacting, by no modification is made to affect us in any other manner than the same events or characters would do in our relationships of life. We carry our fire-side concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go thither, like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate.. We must live our toilsome lives twice, over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that neutral ground, of character which stood between vice and virtue; or which, in fact, was indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in question-that happy breathing-place from the burden of a perpetual moral questioning-the sanctuary and quiet. Alsatia of hunted casuistry-is broken up and disfranchised as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images or names of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread * Vide No. XXVI. p. 174. |