ockdale,[169] who,
after a condemned silence of nearly half a century, like a vivacious
spectre throwing aside his shroud in gaiety, came forward, a venerable
man in his eightieth year, to assure us of the immortality of one of the
worst poets of his age; and for this wrote his own memoirs, which only
proved, that when authors are troubled with a literary hallucination,
and possess the unhappy talent of reasoning in their madness, a little
raillery, if it cannot cure, may serve at least as a salutary regimen.

I shall illustrate the case of condemned authors who will still be
pleading after their trials, by a foreign dramatic writer. Among those
incorrigible murmurers at public justice, not the least extraordinary
was a M. Peyraud de Beaussol, who, in 1775, had a tragedy, _Les
Arsacides_, in six acts, printed, "not as it was acted," as Fielding
says on the title-page of one of his comedies, but "as it was damned!"

In a preface, this _Sir Fretful_, more inimitable than that original,
with all the gravity of an historical narrative, details the public
conspiracy; and with all the pathetic touches of a shipwrecked mariner,
the agonies of his literary egotism.

He declares that it is absurd to condemn a piece which they can only
know by the title, for heard it had never been! And yet he observes,
with infinite _naivete_, "My piece is as generally condemned as if the
world had it all by heart."

One of the great objections against this tragedy was its monstrous plan
of six acts; this innovation did not lean towards improvement in the
minds of those who had endured the long sufferings of tragedies of the
accepted size. But the author offers some solemn reasons to induce us to
believe that six acts were so far from being too many, that the piece
had been more perfect with a seventh! M. de Beaussol had, perhaps, been
happy to have known, that other dramatists have considered that the
usual restrictions are detrimental to a grand genius. Nat. Lee, when in
Bedlam, wrote a play in twenty-five acts.

Our philosophical dramatist, from the constituent principles of the
human mind, and the physical powers of man, and the French nation more
particularly, deduces the origin of the sublime, and the faculty of
attention. The plan of his tragedy is agreeable to these principles:
Monarchs, Queens, and Rivals, and every class of men; it is therefore
grand! and the acts can be listened to, and therefore it is not too
long! It was the hi