A DELIGHT, equal to that with which we saw these volumes advertised, could not have been excited by the promise of a new production from the pen of any other living author whatever. The announcement opened to us the expectation of a pleasure which we had for many years despaired of enjoying again. It was as the intimation of a visit from a long silent, but dearly valued, friend. Had we heard that a MS. play of Shakespeare's, or an early, but missing, novel of Scott's, had been discovered, and was already in the press, the information could not have been more welcome. The intelligence that some more plays of Joanna Baillie were forthcoming seemed to relieve our shoulders of the weight which the cares of many years have cast upon them. It brought along with it a resuscitation of the poetic ardour of our youth; it awakened that long dormant eagerness of curiosity with which we used to look forward to the publication of her volumes, in those remote days when Wordsworth was yet unknown, and the first faint beams of the genius of Walter Scott had only shewn themselves in a few and scattered miscellaneous poems, and Southey's name was not yet glorified by the production of Madoc, or Kehama, or Rodericand Milman was a sap at Eton, and Byron a rebel at Harrow. The advertisement in the Times, which told us that these three new volumes of dramas were in the press, was magical in its influence, and recalled with a vividness and distinctness which was quite unparalleled the recollection of some of the happiest moments and keenest feelings of our early youth. Again we were brought back to the time when we used, in the midday heat of some summer holiday, to mount half way up to the forked branches of a tall and favourite elm, and there sit for hours together in our aerial arbour, forgetting all the sober realities of our then existence, masters, lessons, and exercises, and wholly absorbed by the love of Basil, the ambition of Ethwald, or the fearful passion of De Montfort. Again we were reminded of those crude, but sincere, and often felicitous criticisms, of our

schoolboy days, when, of a long winter evening, we discussed about the playroom fire the position which ought to be assigned to Joanna Baillie in the ranks of dramatic literature; while we seemed again to hear the observations, and to have before us the looks, manner, and even voices, of those who sided with us, or against us, in the high appreciation of her genius, at an age when we estimated the excellence of a tragedy by the emotions it excited, by the tears it drew from us, and by the thrill of terror which chilled us as we read. Again we seemed to feel the exultation with which, on the first publication of Marmion, we burst into the study of a dull, plodding, cold-blooded, unimaginative elf, who presumed to question the transcendant merits of our authoress, and, at once putting all his petty cavils to silence, and justifying our own enthusiasm by an appeal to the irresistible authority of Scott, recited, with wondrous emphasis, but not, perhaps, with a like discretion, that beautiful testimony to her genius, which Erskine is supposed to utter when admonishing the minstrel :

"To emulate the notes that rung
From the wild harp, which silent hung
By silver Avon's holy shore,
Till twice a hundred years roll'd o'er;
When she, the bold enchantress, came
With fearless hand and heart on flame!
From the pale willow snatch'd the treasure,
And swept it with a kindred measure;
Till Avon's swans, while rung the grove
With Montfort's hate and Basil's love,
Awakening at the inspired strain,
Deem'd their own Shakespeare sang
again."†

But delighted as we were at the announcement of the volumes before us -eagerly impatient as we were for their publication- cross as we made our bookseller by our importunate inquiries after them, and our unjust reproaches at their not being sent us before they were ready-and cross as we were ourselves with one and all the members of that many-headed firm in Paternoster Row, who for nearly three weeks had held the word of promise to our ear and broken it to our hopes;

Londan: 1836, Longman and Co.

when the delay was at last over, and the work lay, in its glossy green calico dress, fairly before us, we could hardly summon the resolution to open it. We lingered in cutting the leaves - our hearts misgave us; and it was only after much idling and procrastination that we turned with fear and trembling to examine its contents. We dreaded lest our expectations should be disappointed-lest these later plays should prove unworthy the high celebrity of their author-and lest, on rising from the perusal of them, we should find that the early-implanted and long-cherished admiration, which had been inspired by the wonderful creations of the summer of her days and the vigour of her genius, had in any degree suffered check or diminution from the perusal of the feebler efforts of her age. Our alarm was quite superfluous. We might have spared ourselves the pain of these petty, jealous, and mistrustful feelings. The new work has surpassed all that we had expected, or could have ventured to hope for; and we have not the slightest hesitation in asserting-and we are prepared to maintain our opinion against all gainsayers whosoever

- that to meet with any thing in dramatic literature equal to " Henriquez," "The Separation," "The Phantom," parts of "The Homicide," and some scenes of "The Bride," we must pass over all that has been written, except by Joanna Baillie herself, during the space of the last two hundred years, and revert to the golden days of Elizabeth and James I. So said Scott, in verse, some thirty years ago; and we, from the very bottom of our hearts, and in plain prose, coincide in his judgment, not only with regard to those earlier dramas to which he alluded, but to these, their younger brethren, which are now before us.

The first work of our authoress commenced a series of plays on the stronger passious of the human heart. It was opened by an introduction which was universally admired, and, as a piece of prose composition, ranks with Dryden's preface to his Religio Laici as a masterpiece of the kind. We most particularly recommend this essay to the attention of our readers. In it she stated the outline of her plan, and entered upon a minute philosophical inquiry into the source of the pleasure which we derive from the higher order of dramatic representations. Her de

sign was to exhibit each passion in its serious and ridiculous points of view, as the subject of a separate tragedy and comedy; and thus exalt the stage, by directing its efforts to an important moral end, and rendering it more immediately the means, than it hitherto had ever been, of making man better acquainted with himself, of revealing to him the secret workings of his nature, and of disclosing to him the subtlety, strength, and operation of those great enemies of his happiness, which, from the very slightest beginnings, will often rapidly grow up and swell into the most terrible and overwhelming consequences, and never fail of becoming the tyrants of the breast in which they have once been permitted to make good their footing. The plan of such a work was grand in its conception, and evinced the extensive range and capacity of the mind from which it emanated. Its value could not be questioned by any one who was willing to admit the almost axiomatic truth, that example is more effectively instructive than precept. On the first blush of the design, two objections might indeed have suggested themselves; first, that from the time and labour necessary for its accomplishment, there was a probability of the genius of the author becoming wearied with the task to which it had devoted itself as perhaps has been the case with Joanna Baillie, and may account for our having plays on Love, Hatred, Ambition, Fear, Hope, Jealousy, Remorse, but none on Envy or Revenge; and, in the second place, that there was danger lest, in the prosecution of such a plan, the essential requisites of dramatic effect should be sacrificed to the moral object contemplated; and the reader, or spectator, instead of being carried on by a rapidly progressing action, should have his interest checked and his curiosity tantalised, and find the business of the scene retarded, while the characters were engaged in reciprocating the clauses of a metaphysical discussion, or, to borrow a phrase from the conventicle, improving the events as they arose by practical reflections. In meaner hands, there can be no doubt but objections of this latter description would have been continually recurring; but the first three plays of the series completely shewed that no such blunders, in the accomplishment of her scheme, were to be

apprehended from our authoress. She was far too well skilled in the restive and perverse nature of the animal whom it was her object to improve, while she entertained him, to lose sight of that impatience and revulsion with which, from infancy to old age, he never ceases to start aside from the importunate inculcation of sage precepts at any time, and most particularly when they are obtruded on his moments of relaxation or amusement. She was well aware of the jealousy and suspicion which all mankind cast upon the person who arrogates to himself the superiority of a teacher; and, content with disclosing to her reader the dark workings of the passion she treated in a course of striking scenes, she then, with the exception of a few brief and impressive passages that were naturally called forth by the situations, left him to draw his own moral conclusions from them for himself. As long as the plays were published anonymously, and were considered as the productions of a man, there was but one opinion entertained with regard either to the grandeur of the general plan, or the exquisite skill displayed in that portion of the work which was submitted to the judgment of the public. But, strange as it may appear, no sooner was it known that the first volume of Plays on the Passions was written by a female and a gentlewoman, than it became exposed to bear the full brunt of that strangely mingled stream of epigram and rhodomontade, sneer and paradox, which was allowed at that time to circulate among the reading world as the pure and unmixed waters of criticism, in the early numbers of the Edinburgh Review. This attack, which, as far as the plays themselves were concerned, attempted to do no more than trifle with, and set forth for malicious observation, a few such careless lines and inconsiderate passages as may be found in any production, however rare its excellence, and as any fair and generous critic would have scorned to notice, was principally levelled against the plan on which the work was composed: and it maintained, among other things equally absurd, a proposition, which we cite as a specimen of the sort of trash that passed current under the authority of the leading Review of those days, that "plays had no moral influence at all."

why Because forsooth, "they

a glorious non sequitur! What incomparable twaddle! As if the character did not imbibe as deep a dye from the colour of its amusements, as it does from its most serious occupations. Only carry on this maxim to its legitimate and immediate consequences, and what is the result? Why, simply this, that as long as a man only reads for his amusement, it is perfectly immaterial what may be the nature of his lecture; that, provided he has no purpose in perusing the volume beyond the entertainment of a leisure hour, it is the same thing whether he turn to the pages of the Paradise Lost or La Pucelle-whether he dwell upon the sound, manly, health-inspiring scenes of the Waverley novels, or bathe his soul in the abominations of those licentious French romances, which we understand abound among us, but of which we are, thank God! even ignorant of the names. But worse than nonsensical as this, and other articles ensuing, against Joanna Baillie's earlier productions were in their real matter, there was a sharp, brisk, animated air about the style of these compositions, which took hold of the attention. They were trash, it is true; but they read so like good sense, that the judgment was bewildered and confused. The dogmas they contained were delivered with an air so authoritative, and were recommended by so many sparkling jests, that the unwary reader was at once awed and tickled, and led to receive them without suspicion as the lucubrations of some original, but sound and laughing philosopher. These papers for a time availed in checking the popularity of the works against which their animadversions were directed. The same engine was subsequently brought into play, and with the same pernicious success, against the poetical reputation of Wordsworth and Southey; but they, like our authoress, have happily outlived the effect of its discharge. The critic's petard was only loaded with powder; and though at the time it made a noise and a smoke, and blew a world of dust into men's eyes; the noise has passed away, the dust and smoke have dispersed, and the public, recovered from the blinding and stun ning effects of the explosion, have come to despise the silly and mischievous boys who occasioned it; while the fair talents, which it had momentarily ob

"

Now more wondered at,

By breaking through the foul and ugly mists

Of vapours that did seem to strangle them."

We have referred to these early productions of our authoress, because the first volume of the present collection contains the continuation and conclusion of that series of plays on the passions, with the commencement of which her literary labours opened, and which was made the object of the most unjustifiable and persevering course of attack that ever disgraced the pages of any respectable periodical publication. But we proceed to our notice of the dramas now before us. It is our intention to pass cursorily over the greater number of them, and select one or two for long and continuous extracts,--a plan which we conceive will not only prove most fair to the authoress, but also most agreeable to the reader.

The first drama is "Romiero, a tragedy on Jealousy." After Othello,

any attempt to treat this passion was venturing on perilous ground. But in Othello we are presented with the prospect of a noble soul subdued and suffering under the sudden visitation of à passion which was foreign to its nature, and only there engendered by bad arts. In Romiero, on the contrary, we are shewn a man who is of an essentially jealous disposition. Othello, without Iago, would have gone to his grave generously confident of the love and purity of Desdemona. Romiero's tempter is his own dark spirit; and no depth of affection or austerity of virtue in his wife could have guaranteed her against the morbid and restless action of his ruling passion. Though its fires are stifled for a time, they are never thoroughly extinguished; though he is compelled by unquestionable proof to confess that his jealousy had been conceived upon false grounds, and was most wickedly injurious to its object in one instance, he is found immediately after entering on another track of suspicion with as full and implicit a reliance on the certainty of his own dark imaginings. We have often heard it stated that Othello was not jealous, and we had hitherto thought that there was a great deal more of paradox than truth in the assertion. We have now come round to that opinion. The hero of Joanna Baillie's play

VOL. XIII. NO. LXXIV.

affords by his conduct a perfect vindication of the hero of Shakespeare's. But how chances it that we have lit upon this subject? The fact is, that there is no possibility of reading Romiero without finding our thoughts continually reverting to Othello. This is an evil. It would be so under any circumstances; but is more particularly so in the present instance, as it forces the very weakest and least agreeable play of the present collection into constant comparison with, perhaps, the most exquisite and affecting of the works of Shakespeare. Great skill has been exhibited in the management of the plot of this tragedy. The disabusing Romiero of his first fit of jealousy, and the subsequent re-excitement of the passion on new grounds would have cleft the play in two, and left it most miserably broken-backed, but for the continuous interest in the fate of Sebastian, out of which the other incidents grow, and with which they have immediate connexion.

The next play, the "Alienated Manor," a comedy on jealousy, is particularly lively and well imagined. The passion of the husband is painted with great truth and ingenuity, and placed in situations which expose its folly to the most ridiculous advantage. The comic characters, like those of Ben Jonson, are, perhaps, rather too much copies of the fleeting humours of the age, which must cease to excite laughter after the recollection of them has passed away, than portraits of those permanent follies of human nature which must prove effective as long as man continues to be the vain, and frivolous, and inconsequent creature he now is. The character of Sir Level Clump, for instance, a gentleman much consulted on account of his taste in landscape gardening, is liable to this objection; as is also that of the German philosopher; though both are admirably drawn. This remark does not, of course, apply generally to the whole body of the dramatis persona, but only to those of an eccentric cast. We are, by the by, most especially pleased with the sound good sense, the lively temper, and the reasonable love for her husband, displayed by Mrs. Charville. We have known the counterpart, perhaps the antitype, of this lady: she is just the very person to make the happiness of a sensible man, and the involuntary torment of such a senti

mental, exacting, sensitive, jealous, coxcomb as Charville.

"Henriquez," a tragedy on remorse, is perfect. We shall not quote from it, as the play must of necessity become generally known to the public. Its merits will force it into representation on the stage. With the single exception of the scene between Henriquez and the Confessor, of which the beauty, though very great, is epic, and not dramatic, there is not a single line but would prove effective in the hands of a skilful actor. The part seems made for Charles Kemble, and Charles Kemble born to play the part. He is, we have heard, most anxious to undertake it; and, with Miss Faucit to support him in Leonora, surely such a tragedy, so acted, could not fail of drawing houses, and proving profitable to the manager. "Henriquez" is the last of the series of Plays on the Passions.

The "Martyr," a dramatic poem of great merit, concludes the first volume.

The "Separation," a tragedy, opens the second volume of the collection; and from this piece we shall proceed to lay such extracts before our readers as will, we are sure, convince them that Joanna Baillie is not only by far the greatest dramatist of modern times, but that she has, without the suspicion of any intentional imitation,—indeed, from her never imitating them at all, we presume she has read them very little, but that she has, by instinct, by the natural bent of her genius, or by some means or other, become possessed of the real spirit, and all the most eminent and valuable characteristics which distinguished those great men who wrote for the theatre in the age of Elizabeth. She has their easy and simple flow of dramatic blank-verse, of which the tone and style are as various as the tone and style of the ordinary intercourse of society common occasions scarcely raised above the level of common conversation, but rising into eloquence and poetry with the deepening interest and the swelling emotions of the scene; she has their apparently unprepared and spontaneous course of dialogue; she has their apt propriety of sentiment and expression, so true to the situation and temper of the character, that, however extraordinary the circumstances in which he may be placed, they never strike the

on

cause he is always represented as acting and speaking naturally under them; she has, above all, their just and correct knowledge of man as he really is, and their sound good sense and taste to paint him as he really is, without having recourse, for the sake of effect, to any of those stilted, strutting, ranting, exaggerated caricatures of unredeemed vice or unalloyed virtue which infested the theatrical representations of the last century, or which is a great deal worse without offending our moral sense by the introduction of any specimens of the newly invented monstrosities of the present age, and defacing her works by such characters as flourish in the poems of Byron, the plays of Victor Hugo, and the novels of Lytton Bulwer,—men and women steeped in the blood of many murders, and polluted by long and unbridled licentiousness, and yet, in spite of their iniquities, exhibiting themselves as patterns of parental, filial, or conjugal piety and tenderness! " Separation," from which we are about to cite several almost consecutive scenes, may be adduced as proof of Joanna Baillie's being in full possession of all the great and rare excellencies which we have ascribed to her. The story is as follows:-During Count Garcio's absence in the wars, the residence in which he had left his wife and child is so injured by an earthquake that they have of necessity been compelled to remove to a castle which had long been untenanted by his family, and which he had inherited in right of the countess, on the death of her only brother. Soon after this change of abode, the play opens with a scene in the chamber of Baldwin, an old retainer of Count Garcio's house, who dies uttering some broken, but sufficiently intelligible, sentences, intimating that the previous lord of the domain, the brother of the countess, did not come fairly by his end, and that the count was the murderer. These exclamations are overheard by the countess, and the effect produced upon her mind is shewn in the following

Scene:

"The Apartment of the COUNTESS. She is discovered pacing to and fro with slow, thoughtful steps, then stops short, and stands in a musing posture some time before she speaks aloud.

Countess. "Tis often thus; so are we framed by nature.