To these brief remarks on the Genius and Conduct, it will be necessary to add a few observations on the Characters, the Passions, the Comic Painting, and the Imaginative Powers, of his drama.
"To give a stage,
Ample, and true with life,—voice, action, age,
To story coldly told—
To raise our ancient sovereigns from their herse,
To enliven their pale trunks,"
and to make us
"Joy in their joy, and tremble at their rage,"
is, indeed, a task of the utmost magnitude and difficulty, but one in which our poet has succeeded with a felicity altogether unparalleled. His characters live and breathe before us; we perceive not only what they say and do, but what they feel and think; and we are tempted to believe, that like some magician of old, he possessed the art of transfusing himself into the frame, and of speaking through the organs, of those whom he wished to represent; so exactly has he drawn, without deviation from the general laws and broad tract of life, each class and condition of mankind.
Whether he delineate the possessor of a throne, or the tenant of a cottage; the warrior in battle, or the statesman in debate; youth in its fervour, or old age in its repose; guilt in agony, or innocence in