o that we should lift the veil which time has thrown
over the past, and see how men have thought and acted through the lapse
of ages upon the uniform principles of human passion, which ever have
been and ever will be the same, and by that means distinguish that which
is natural, innate and permanent in man, from that which is adventitious
and acquired. He whose knowledge of the world is circumscribed within
the narrow limits of one generation or one society can know man only as
he appears in the superficial colouring and peculiar modification of
personal habit, derived from the fashions, the modes, and the capricious
changes of that time, and that society, while the great body of human
nature remains buried from his sight. "The accidental compositions of
heterogeneous modes (says the gigantic critic Johnson) are dissolved by
the chance which combined them, but the uniform simplicity of primitive
qualities neither admits increase nor suffers decay." And assuredly
there was never an age in which man so masked his nature under modish
innovations as he does in the present.

[Footnote 6: Dr. Johnson.]

The works of the ancients, says a great writer, are the mines from which
alone the treasures of true criticism are to be dug up--the pure sources
of that penetration which enables us to distinguish legitimate
excellence from spurious pretensions to it. He, therefore, who would get
at the true principles of dramatic criticism ought to read the poetry
and criticism of the two great ancient languages, and to have formed
some acquaintance with those authors, whether ancient or modern, who
have furnished the world with the great leading principles upon which
dramatic poetry is constructed. Doctor Johnson has informed us that
before the time of Dryden, the structure of dramatic poetry was not
generally understood; and what was the consequence? "AUDIENCES,"
continues the doctor, "APPLAUDED BY INSTINCT, AND POETS OFTEN PLEASED BY
CHANCE."[7]

[Footnote 7: See Johnson's Life of Dryden.]

Without calling in the aid of such high authority, no risk of
contradiction can be incurred by asserting that he must be radically
deficient in the requisites of a dramatic critic, who is not
sufficiently versed in philological literature to discriminate between
the various qualities of diction--to distinguish the language of the
schools from that of the multitude--the polished diction of refinement
from the coarse style of household colloquy--