are considerations worthy, if not of the attention of your correspondent, at least of the serious contemplation of ministers; and in order to ascertain the fact of the existence of these sea monsters, I strongly recommend, without loss of time, such measures as, in the wisdom of government, may appear most conducive to that end. But perhaps the ships that have gone on the northern expedition have orders to this effect. W. B. Edinburgh, 9th May 1818.

NOTICES OF THE ACTED DRAMA IN

LONDON.

No V.

Covent Garden Theatre.

MR SHEIL, the author of the Apostate, has written a new tragedy called BELLAMIRA, OF THE FALL OF TUNIS, which was produced at this theatre on the 22d of April. It is characterised by the same faults as Mr Sheil's first production, and they are carried to even a more extravagant extent; but, from what we could judge by the representation, it possesses more and greater beauties. The plot is, to the last degree, puerile and improbable. It seems to have been taken from the circulating library, which could very well afford to part with it, for there are five hundred or five thousand as good left behind. The scene is laid at Tunis,—but wherefore, there appears no conceivable reason, for all the chief persons are Italians. In fact, Chance has brought the five principal characters together, for the sole purpose of affording Mr Sheil an opportunity of writing a tragedy about them; and he seems to have chosen Tunis, in preference to any other place, in order that he might be delivered of certain common-places which he had conceived, respecting the conduct of the European powers, in so long suffering a herd of vulgar barbarians to make slaves of their more polite and civilized Christian neighbours, who would no doubt have been greatly scandalized at doing any thing of the kind themselves. The plot, which we in part extract from the newspapers, is as follows:

Count Manfredi (Mr C. Kemble), a nobleman of Naples, who is in slave

ry at Tunis, discovers that Charles V. is marching against the pirate city. He arms the Christian slaves against their tyrants, and becomes himself their leader; binding himself by an oath, that not liberty, or even the embraces of his wife and child, shall make him abandon the common cause. At this period his wife Bellamira (Miss O'Neil), whom he considered to be in Italy, and separated from him for ever, arrives at Tunis with her child, as slaves. Manfredi attempts to save his wife from the grasp of the barbarians, and is, in consequence, about to be sacrificed to their rage, when Montalto (Mr Young) arrives on the spot, and saves him. Montalto has been admiral of Naples; but being exiled, by the intrigues of his own brother. Salerno (Mr Terry), he repairs to Tunis, abjures his religion, and is placed in high power. He uses it to give freedom to Manfredi, his wife, and child, about whom he is particularly interested, on account of her resemblance, both in name and person, to his own (as he supposes) murdered child-murdered by Salerno. At this period Sinano (Mr Macready), who is also a renegade from his country, arrives from the barbarian camp, with orders to destroy the chief of the Christian slaves, and to depose Montalto from the government. In Manfredi he finds his deadly foe, the favoured lover of Bellamira, and the cause of his disgrace and exile from his native land. He separates the husband and wife, disgraces and imprisons Montalto and Manfredi, and takes Bellamira to his palace. Various scenes ensue between these two characters, in which she resists all his threats and intreaties, and rejects his proffered love. At this time Tunis is attacked by the Spaniards. Sinano is wounded in the battle which ensues, but has still strength left to arrive at the dungeon where he has confined his enemies, in order to destroy them. He kills Montalto, and is killed by him, but not before Montalto has discovered that Bellamira is his child, and Salerno his guilty but repentant brother. Tunis is now taken; and the tragedy closes with the reunion of Manfredi and Bellamira.

This, as the reader will perceive, is forced and extravagant enough. But in truth, the plot of a tragedy, as well as of any other of the higher species

of poetry, is of the smallest possible consequence; at least Shakspeare and the Greek tragedians thought so, and they knew something of the matter, whatever our modern dramatists may think. With them character and passion were every thing, and plot nothing: with us it is just the reverse. That the story of Electra had been chosen for the subject of tragedies before his time, was perhaps the very reason that Sophocles fixed upon it for the most beautiful that remains to us of his. The audience knew every particular of the plot beforehand; so that there was nothing to divide or distract their attention from the developements of character or passion. On the contrary, the audience of a modern play can find nothing better to do, the moment it begins, than set about to conjecture how it will end. It was so at Covent Garden theatre on the first night of Bellamira. The viva voce critics who sat near us in the pit began to discover, in the second act, that Miss O'Neil* could be no other than C. Kemble's wife; shortly after, they settled that she would turn out to be Young's daughter; and lastly, as Mr Terry still remained without " a local habitation or a name," they concluded, that as he must be somebody, he was the brother of Mr Young, and consequently the uncle of Miss O'Neil. Before long, all these conjectures proved to be very true; and when they ceased to be secrets, the persons who had made the discoveries, having no farther interest in the matter, talked of something else.

It is this" fatal curiosity," this diseased appetite for violent stimulants, that has been the bane of the modern stage. It was at first the effect of bad dramas, and is now become the cause of them; and what is worse, it is the cause of the absence of good ones. We have poets who are qualified to excel in the very highest departments of our acting drama; but they are deterred from attempting it, on account of the vitiated state of the public taste. Mr Sheil possesses powers that might and should have been employed in helping to correct this unhealthy

The audience of a modern play always speak and think of the characters by the name of the persons who act them. This is a more severe and sagacious criticism than they intend it to be.

craving after unwholesome and enervating food; instead of which, they have hitherto done nothing but administer to and aggravate it. And the worst of all is, that he has made his chief agent in this bad work, a charming creature, who is endowed with qualities adapted, in the most beautiful manner, to a directly opposite purpose. Miss O'Neil, and beings like her, were given us to cure the evils of humanity, not to enhance them; to "make a sunshine in a shady place," not to scatter clouds and tempests in our path. In the Apostate, Mr Sheil carried this moral torture, to which we allude, as far as we thought it could go; but in the tragedy before us he has invented a new kind of rack, by which the feelings are absolutely drawn and quartered. He places Miss O'Neil on a certain spot in the centre of the stage, and contrives to keep her there by means of the mostviolent emotions, which pull at the same moment in precisely opposite directions, and with nearly equal forces. The three grand cords (besides several subsidiary ones) by which he effects this notable purpose, are, maternal, conjugal, and filial affection. The maternal, however, seems to have the strongest power; and accordingly, a little child is used as a kind of loadstone to draw her about just as the author pleases. It is introduced into several scenes for this sole purpose, and never speaks a word during the whole play. This is very mischievous and unworthy trifling; and, judging from ourselves, its only effect is to give unmingled pain at first, and at length to become quite ludicrous.

We shall endeavour to return to this subject in a future Number. In the mean time, we must add, that we think this second dramatic production of Mr Sheil evinces rare and valuable powers. The language, though sometimes overstrained, and disfigured by the common-places of poetry, is frequently pure, vigorous, and unaffected; the characters are, upon the whole, powerfully and consistently drawn; and there occasionally occur original and highly poetical thoughts and images.

Drury-Lane Theatre.

MARLOW'S JEW OF MALTA.-On the 24th of April, this play was re

vived here. The Jew of Malta is, on many accounts, a very curious and interesting work. It is undoubtedly the foundation of Shakspeare's Jew. But it possesses claims to no common admiration for itself; for, besides the high poetical talent it exhibits, it may be considered as the first regular and consistent English drama; the first unassisted and successful attempt to embody that dramatic unity which had been till then totally neglected or overlooked. The dramatic poems which preceded the Jew of Malta could be considered as dramas only in so far as they exhibited events, instead of relating them. The poet, instead of telling a story himself, introduced various persons to speak their own thoughts and feelings, as they might be supposed to arise from certain events and circumstances; but his characters, for the most part, expressed themselves in a style and language moulded and tinctured by his particular habits of thinking and feeling.

Marlow was the first poet before Shakspeare who possessed any thing like real dramatic genius, or who seemed to have any distinct notion of what a drama should be, as distinguished from every other kind of poetical composition. It is with some hesitation that we dissent from the opinion of an able writer in this Magazine, in thinking, that the Jew of Malta is Marlow's best play. Not that we like it better than the Faustus or Edward II., but it is better as a play. There is more variety of character, and more of moral purpose, in the Edward II., and the Faustus exhibits loftier and more impassioned poetry; but neither of those plays possess, in so great a degree as the one before us, that rare, and when judiciously applied, most important quality, which we have called dramatic unity,-that tending of all its parts to engender and sustain the same kind of feeling throughout. In the Jew of Malta, the characters are all, without exception, wicked, in the common acceptation of the term. Barabas, the Governor, Ithamore, the Friars, Abigail, to compass their own short-sighted views, all set moral restraint at defiance, and they are all unhappy, -and their unhappiness is always brought about by their own guilt. We cannot agree with many persons in thinking, that this play is without a

VOL. III.

moral purpose; or that Barabas is a mere monster, and not a man. We cannot allow, that even Ithamore is gratuitously wicked. There is no such thing in nature-least of all in human nature, and Marlow knew this. It is true that Ithamore appears to be so at first sight. He finds it a pleasant pastime to go about and kill men and women who have never injured him. But it must not be forgotten that he is a slave; and a slave should no more be expected to keep a compact with the kind from which he is cut off, than a demon or a wild beast. Who shall limit the effects of slavery on the human mind? Let those answer for the crimes of Ithamore who broke the link that united him to his species. For a more full account of this play in its original state, we refer the reader to Vol. II. p. 260, of this Magazine.

The alterations in the Jew of Malta, as it has now been performed, are chiefly confined to omissions, with the exception of a long and tedious scene between Lodowick and Mathias at the commencement, in which each tells the other and the audience the story of his love for Abigail, the Jew's daughter, which said love nobody cares any thing about. What could be the inducement to change the fine and characteristic commencement of the original, in which we are at once introduced to Barabas in his countinghouse, among his gold? Lodowick and Mathias are very uninteresting and intrusive people at best; and it is quite time enough to be troubled with them when the author wants them in order to heighten his principal character. But it is a remarkable fact, that managers of theatres seem to know less of the true purposes and bearings of the dramatic art than any other given set of people whatever. After saying this generally, it is but fair to add, that we noticed two slight alterations in this play, which seemed to evince something that looked almost like genius. In the third act, after having purchased the slave Ithamore, in order to ascertain whether he will suit his purposes, Barabas desired to know his "birth, condition, and profession." Ithamore answers, that his profession is any thing his new master pleases. "Hast thou no trade?" says Barabas, "then listen to my words;" and then, after counselling him to dis2 D

as great a mistake, and of the same kind, as those over-wise people make who think that fun is vulgarity. The readers of this Magazine will not expect us to say much on such pieces as these. There would be little chance of our having any thing to say worth hearing on any subject, if we could not better employ both their time and

our own.

-we

There have been two or three other new afterpieces since our last, but we have been prevented from seeing them. We hear they are quite worthless. If, however, on seeing them we should think otherwise, delay shall not be made an excuse for neglect. Mr Elliston has also returned to the stage. If he keeps to his own line,-in which he is at present quite unrivalled,shall congratulate the lovers of hearty happy gaiety on a most delightful reacquisition. Since his absence, a whole constellation of dramatic stars have been blotted out. Stars, too, whose forms and influences we can afford to part with less than any others. That whimsical being, Benedict, and that 66 gay creature of the element," Mercutio, administer "medicine for sick minds, worth all the pharmacopoeia of all the solemn fools who have been admitted to practice since the establishment of the College of Souls' Physicians.

THE HERALD.

I Do remember a strange man-a Herald, And hereabouts he dwells, whom late I noted, In party-coloured coat, like a fool's jacket, Or morris-dancer's dress. Musty his looks, Like to a skin of ancient shrivelled parchment,

Or an old pair of leather brogues twice turned. And round the dusky room he did inhabit, Whose wainscoat seem'd as old as Noah's Ark,

Were divers shapes of ugly ill-form'd monsters,

Hung up in scutcheons like an old church aisle ;

A blue boar rampant, and a griffin gules, A gaping tiger, and a cat-a-mountain, What nature never form'd, nor madman thought,

"Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire," -And right before him lay a dusty pile Of ancient legers, books of evidence, Torn parish registers, probates and testaments,

From whence, with cunning art and sly contrivance,

He fairly culled divers Pedigrees,
(Which make, full oft, the son beget the
father,

And give to maiden laidies fruitful issues);
And next, by dint of transmutation strange,
Did coin his musty vellum into gold.
Anon comes in a gaudy city youth,
Whose father, for oppression and vile cun-
ning,

Lies roaring now in limbo-lake the while;
And after some few words of mystic import,
Of Douglas, Mowbray, Steuart, Hamilton,
Most gravely uttered by the smoke-dried
sage,
He takes in lieu of gold the vellum roll,
With arms emblazon'd and Lord Lyon's
signet,

And struts away a well born gentleman.+
Observing this, I to myself did say,
An' if a man did need a coat of arms,
Here lives a caitiff that would sell him one.
S.

To the Veiled Conductor of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

SIR,

THERE are few things so much affected by the change of manners and circumof evidence. stances, as the quality and the effect Facts which our fathers were prepared to receive upon very slender and hearsay testimony, we are sometimes disposed to deny positively, even when fortified by all that the laws of evidence can do for them, by the confession of the perpetrator of wickedness, by the evidence of its victims, by the eye-sight and oath of impartial witnesses, and by all which could, in an ordinary case, "make faith," to use a phrase of the civilians, betwixt man and man, In the present day he would be hooted as an idiot, who would believe an old woman guilty of witchcraft, upon evidence, on the tenth part of which a Middlesex jury would find a man guilty of felony; and our ancestors

*See if the bear be gone from the gentleman-and how much of him he hath eaten they are never curst but when they are hungry-this is fairy gold, boy.

Winter Night's Tale. + Clown. Give me the lye, do, and try whether I am not now a gentleman born. Autol. I know you are, now, sir, a gentleman born.

Clown. Aye, and have been so any time these four hours.