ms, and touches them with
majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it
with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.

But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with
that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great
masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of
the kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood, or a weak
attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as
moral truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries
of some gross vice or weakness, with which the author, in common with
his auditors, are infected. Hence what has been called the classical
and domestic drama. Addison's _Cato_ is a specimen of the one; and
would it were not superfluous to cite examples of the other! To such
purposes poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of
lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would
contain it. And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this
nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment
and passion, which, divested of imagination, are other names for
caprice and appetite. The period in our own history of the grossest
degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in
which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the
triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone
illuminating an age unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating
principle pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry
ceases to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality:
wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph,
instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt, succeed to
sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which
is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the
very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a
monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth new
food, which it devours in secret.

The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of
expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other,
the connexion of poetry and social good is more observable in the
drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable that the
highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the
highest d