for it in vain in the nineteenth century; all other Satires
seem complimentary to their victims when read after "The Dunciad"--and
could a man, whose heart was not heroic, have given us another Iliad,
which, all unlike as it is to the Greek, may be read with transport,
even after Homer's?

We have not yet, it would seem, found the object of our search--a Great
Poem. Let us extend our quest into the Elizabethan age. We are at once
sucked into the theatre. With the whole drama of that age we are
conversant and familiar; but whether we understand it or not, is another
question. It aspires to give representations of Human Life in all its
infinite varieties, and inconsistencies, and conflicts, and turmoils
produced by the Passions. Time and space are not suffered to interpose
their unities between the Poet and his vast design, who, provided he can
satisfy the spectators by the pageant of their own passions moving
across the stage, may exhibit there whatever he wills from life, death,
or the grave. 'Tis a sublime conception--and sometimes has given rise to
sublime performance; but has been crowned with full success in no hands
but those of Shakespeare. Great as was the genius of many of the
dramatists of that age, not one of them has produced a Great Tragedy. A
Great Tragedy indeed! What! without harmony or proportion in the
plan--with all puzzling perplexities and inextricable entanglements in
the plot--and with disgust and horror in the catastrophe? As for the
characters, male and female--saw ye ever such a set of swaggerers and
rantipoles as they often are in one act--Methodist preachers and demure
young women at a love-feast in another--absolute heroes and heroines of
high calibre in a third--and so on, changing and shifting name and
nature, according to the laws of the Romantic Drama forsooth--but in
hideous violation of the laws of nature--till the curtain falls over a
heap of bodies huddled together, without regard to age or sex, as if
they had been overtaken in liquor. We admit that there is gross
exaggeration in the picture; but there is always truth in a tolerable
caricature--and this is one of a tragedy of Webster, Ford, or Massinger.

It is satisfactory to know that the good sense, and good feeling, and
good taste of the people of England, will not submit to be belaboured by
editors and critics into unqualified admiration of such enormities. The
Old English Drama lies buried in the dust with all its tragedies. Nev