should not lead to
the practise of tragedy, while the existence of the Kembles as players
and managers, might be thought to promise well for the tragic stage.

Yet there has always been something out of joint with English nineteenth
century tragedy. Of Lamb's _John Woodvil_ and Godwin's _Antonio_ mention
has been made. Byron's tragedies are indeed by no means the worst part
of his work; but they also shared the defects of that work as poetry,
and they were not eminently distinguished for acting qualities. Scott
had no dramatic faculty; Shelley's _Cenci_, despite its splendid poetry,
is not actable; indeed the only one of the great English nineteenth
century _Pleiade_ who was successful on the stage was Coleridge; and
_Remorse_ and _Zapolya_ are not masterpieces.

Yet the fascination of the theatre, or at least of the drama, seemed to
continue unaltered, and the attempts on or in it varied from the wild
fantasy pieces of Beddoes (which no stage but the Elizabethan--if even
that--could ever have welcomed) to the curious academic drama of which
types extend not merely from Milman's _Fazio_ in 1815 to Talfourd's
_Ion_ twenty years later, but further still. Of Milman notice has been
taken in his far truer vocation as historian. Talfourd was a good
lawyer, a worthy man, and as noted above, the friend and editor of Lamb.
But his tragedies are very cold, and it is difficult to believe that
_Ion_ can have had any other attraction besides the popularity and skill
of Macready, who indeed was greatly responsible for the appearance both
of this and of better plays. In particular he stood usher to divers
productions of Browning's which have been mentioned, such as the rather
involved and impossible _Strafford_, and the intensely pathetic but not
wholly straightforward _Blot in the 'Scutcheon_. This last is the one
play of the century which--with a certain unsubstantiality of matter, a
defect almost total in character, and a constant provocation to the
fatal question, "Why are all these people behaving in this way?"--has
the actual tragic _vis_ in its central point.

The character, however, and the condemnation of the English drama of the
first half of this century from the literary point of view, are summed
up in the single statement that its most prominent and successful
dramatist was James Sheridan Knowles. Born in 1784, and son of the great
Sheridan's cousin at Cork, Knowles was introduced to London literary
society pretty earl