form of five-act dramas; and Horace's rule is still religiously attended to:

Neve minor, neu sit quinto productior actu

Fabula, quæ posci vult, et spectata reponi.

The critics have not yet informed us why. Neither perhaps can the artist himself tell why he is compelled to invest his drama with a providential character; or perhaps he never thinks of it at all, but merely yields to the requirements of society or the impulse of that divine necessity of genius which reveals in mystery the secrets of Nature long before they are discovered and delineated by the elaborate investigations of critical science. The collective inspirations of genius are divine inspiration they are the revelation from God to man of the laws of order and beauty. The individual artist errs and disobeys and is punished for disobedience; but the collective body of artists in succession never fail to discover and establish, for future guidance, certain laws of propriety which must not be violated. Who can amend the longestablished rules of Greek architecture? Who can improve upon the Gothic ideal temple? perhaps, who is presumptive enough to imagine a better construction of the human form, or a better adaptation of the limbs of a horse for strength and velocity. Artistic discoveries of laws and rules are science; and the laws of science are unchangeable. Is the fivefold character of the legitimate drama one of these laws?

He only,

Agassiz, one of the most eminent comparative anatomists of the day, has remarked that the vertebrated or higher orders of animals, never have more than four organs of progression, which, with the head, which is indispensable to the four, make the number five a natural fixed representative of progressive action. Now, progressive action is life, it is history, it is Providence. Is it not then very natural to suppose that Providence, the great archetype and the soul of the acting drama, should especially reveal itself to man in human society in a fivefold capacity? God has given to man five senses for a fivefold sphere of action. He has given him five fingers for a fivefold instrument of industrial and artistic action, and five toes for a fivefold instrument of progressive action. He has given him a head and four extremities, as the primary actors of his corporeal system. Not without a reason; and man being the noblest representative of the Divine Creative Agent, we should naturally give the precedence to the number five in the sphere of collective, social, and political progress, were it even superseded by some other number in the construction of irrational vertebrated animals. But when we find that all the superior orders of rational and irrational animals are constructed upon this fivefold principle, we are compelled to admit, that, in the sphere of action, the number five must take the precedence as the fittest representative of providential movement. Whether

then the dramatic authors had a reason or not for their five acts, they have hit upon the right number by the inspiration of genius; and it would be hard to persuade either the learned or the unlearned to repeal the law of established usage. The mysterious agency of that recondite spirit of analogy, which works in every thinking mind and every feeling soul, but especially in those whose natures are rendered supereminently sensitive by the study of the laws of order and beauty, would put its veto on the change, and sternly recal the innovator to his allegiance, or teach him, by discomfiture, the folly and presumption of attempting, with his own ephemeral whim, to supersede a divine arrangement.

That mystic spirit that inspired the dramatic poet, unconscious of a reason, to characterise his model of a special Providence by a fivefold unity, has also breathed its kindred prepossessions in favour of this numerical representative of action, in that most perfect of all existing types of elegant and graceful motion, the quadrille. It is a five-act drama, consisting, invariably, of five figures, and five only. Who suggested this? What potent spirit guided the raptured eye to this fatal number, and fixed it there so entranced and enchanted, that, throughout the whole fashionable world of civilised Christendom, a quadrille in less or more than five parts would be accounted a heresy? There is no reason, but that common

inspiration, that instinctive sense of harmonic arrangement and completeness, that satisfies the feelings even before it has addressed or awakened the understanding. The number is consecrated to action by nature consecrated in our bodies, consecrated in our senses-and elevated thence by transcendental sublimation into our feelings and understandings, from which, as from the spring of spiritual life, it bubbles out into the sphere of activity, like the river of God in the paradise of Eden, which parted into four streams, as the fingers from the thumb, and watered the scene of man's primitive existence.

Early did men feel this, and early did the passive spirit of poetry and fable yield to the impulse of its holy inspiration. Students of Nature, and worshipping the forms in which Nature's God manifested his wisdom, they easily imbibed a sacred reverence for numbers, and thus we find, that from immemorial antiquity, four became the number of the series of ages, and the fifth the consummation of the attributes of all. The Gentile poets sang of the fifth, the Regna Saturnia, and the Jewish prophets took up the refrain, and detailed the glories of the Redeemer's kingdom that succeeds the four. The fifth is the dominant in music; and it is neither a local nor a sectarian idea in history or mythology. It is a poetic inspiration, a dramatic division of the course of time, universally known, familiar to all ages of the world, but

especially to those which are most impressible to the occult movements of mystic Nature, undisturbed by the doubts of a suspecting philosophy and the cavilling propensities of the schools of criticism.

This book is intended to justify these pencillings of light from the sunbeams of the mystic and recondite spirit, that

"breathes through all life, extends through all extent," and to reveal the everlasting principles of a science which will occupy, henceforth, minds innumerable, to finish it in detail, with those microscopic eyes which are seldom accorded to the rough pioneer who elaborate the outline of a new idea.