classes of animals should be endued with any quality which might resemble human reason in some of its lowest capacities. Yet let the wonder cease when we reflect how frequently the higher class approximates to the lower, so as to differ from it in shape and outward appointments only. How many men do we meet with in society, endowed with less sensibility than an oyster? how many who are distinguishable from asses only by the shortness of their ears? What paddock in Elysium is a fool fit for? Or must he not rather drop, like his brother-brutes, into the river of Oblivion, and die for ever when he dies at all? How much more grateful to its divine Creator must the breathing fieldflower be, than the vile and offensive tenement of a sinful and (even though it were pure as a cherub's) a scarcely save-worthy soul? But the question is:- Who are the real patrons of the quadrupeds and the monsters? Three classes of candidates are named for this honourable distinction: and the pretensions of each generously allowed by the others. The managers are raised by universal acclamation of the two other parties to this bad eminence. Ah! disinterested rivals! But indeed the sacrifice is too great; Truth nor Justice will allow it. So pusillanimous, so little ambitious in this way have the managers been, that it is only lately they have dared to exhibit any thing out of the common track,-such as pantomime, opera, maudlin tragedy, farces in five acts and in two. They have neglected with the most blameworthy indifference to cultivate the perspicient taste of the public, which has long been declining towards the fourth, or MONSTROUS School of the drama.* For my part, were I a manager,'I would make a bold stroke for popularity, and introduce "the devil and all his works" at once. If the public were determined to be fooled, I would fool them to the very top of - their bent. No half measures for. me: I would go roundly to work. For this purpose the first thing I should do would be to engage a German dramatist who could produce at least one regular certificate of insanity, who had attempted to shoot others and hang himself,-who had drunk blood out of scull-cups and played at skittles with dead men's bones,-who could boast the acquaintance of every wild grave, water-king, old witch, &c. &c. within the belt of the nine Circles,-who was cup and can with Von Goethe and per consequence hand in glove with Mephistopheles,-who was in short practically conversant with all the crimes in the calendar and on terms of easy familiarity with all the demons at either side of Hell-gate. Such a noble Trojan as this would I engage for my Major Domo, were I a manager; and with his assistance would I cater for the public stomach till it sickened with the very hue of the viands. It would be then time. enough to turn about and serve up Adam and Eve in fig-leaves, as a pleasant contrast of nature in a green dress with every thing unnatural in a German one. To relieve the audience, however, by a grateful variety of amusement whilst my tragedist was playing off his men-monsters, and to indulge them in their propensity for quadrupeds, I would occasionally favour them with a performer of this: number of legs. But horses would be too common-place for my ingenuity; were I theatrical purveyor to an English audience, and did they persevere in their present taste, by all that is solemn and serious, I would give them a bear! young biped sewed up in a rug, nor the stuffed Greenlander from Montague-house, but a real, perpendi cular, dancing bear! By thus turning the stage every now and then into a bear-garden I would endeavour to afford the public a consummation of their refined taste in intellectual enjoyments, an union of Not a *To the three which I have already enumerated in my "Letters,"-the Dramatic, the Rhetoric, and the Poetic, I am now to add a fourth,-the Monstrous, as making up the very respectable number of schools through which English Tragedy has successively permeated. The last is only now beginning to engage general admiration, but its merits are of so unequivocal a description as to render its ultimate success with a discerning public inevitable. I have not been premature therefore in branding it with a suitable title and speaking of it as the fourth school of our national drama. the double and dissimilar qualifications of a quadruped and a biped; if it should ever happen to be my lot to turn bearward for the profit and delight of the British nation. Yet neither is it the public who are to be looked upon as the original patrons of the quadrupeds; nor is it to their encouragement that the Monstrous school of drama in England primarily owes its existence and success. We, that is, the public, have many pairs of shoulders; you may lay any weight of obloquy upon them. Nothing is more easy than to ascribe the present degraded state of the stage to the perversity or depravity of the public taste in theatricals. This is a ready and a favourite solution of the phenomenon, especially with those who know it to be false. Do I then pretend to assert that the public taste is not vitious and irrational, at present? No. Do I pretend to assert that the countenance and applause with which the quadrupeds and the monsters meet every night, is not the cause of their present occupation of the stage? No. But how far is the public guilty in this? Entertainment of one kind or other must be had. If we can not have legitimate drama, we must have illegitimate: if we cannot have the noble deeds of men, we must have the damnable gesticulations of monsters; if we cannot have heroes to amuse us, we must have horses. What choice has the public? or how can it show its taste and discrimination?-By tearing the concave (I suppose), by blowing the house-roofto the moon, when such splendid ebullitions of dramatic genius as "The Vespers of Palermo," "Caius Gracchus," &c. &c. are played off before us?-and by groaning at the quadru peds whenever they attempt to enter the lists against the heroes of such doughty performances! This is so reasonable! Seriously, and upon my sincerity, I think the public evinces nothing short of the purest good-taste in preferring the quadrupeds and the monsters to the miserable tragedies from which the Dramatists of the Day expect so much immortality and money. There is something to please at least in one sense in the former; “nil admirari'in a passive sense sounds through every line of the latter. I profess myself a critic in these matters, and yet I honestly declare that I would rather see Mr. Ducrow canter up to the clouds as a knight of a modern pantomime, than Mr. Young stalk across the stage as the hero of a modern tragedy. But granting the postulate, that the public taste is irrational, whose fault is this? Acknowledging the lamentable truth that the million is prone to idolatry of quadrupeds and monsters, and that it still retains the old Jewish propensity to adore devils for deities (at least on the stage); acknowledging this truth, and that the reigning taste of the public exemplifies it,-whose fault is it? Suppose the pedagogues of all the schools in Great Britain were to drop, as by a thunderstroke, their books and birches, with all other orthodox instruments of edification, and assault the ears alone of their pupils with home-made poetry,-would it be any crime if the sufferers were immediately to cry "Whoop!" and sally out to trap-ball and cricket? Certainly not. If those who ought to be their teachers desert the office, and neglecting legitimate modes of instruction seek to overwhelm their unoffending auditors with a perpetual effusion of poetry,-the inattention of the latter is a subject for praise not blame, and their consequent ignorance or bad taste is not their fault, but their misfortune. Exactly by the same rule we may regret the degenerate taste of the public which can indulge itself so gratefully in contemplating night after night the_menagerial exhibitions at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, but we cannot fairly censure it. We may deplore that want of public feeling which permits the boards where Macbeth and Othello have trod to be profaned by the hoof of a quadruped,-which permits the temples of Shakspeare to be metamorphosed into little hells where every unhallowed species of tragic diablerie may be perpetrated with impunity,-we may deplore the want, but we cannot set it down to the public as a crime with which they are justly chargeable. Those who should have directed the public taste and instructed the public judgment, have deserted their post. The shepherds have left their flocks, which have therefore naturally gone astray. They Dráma. What a splendid office it. return every now and then to be sure with a scrip-full of "home-made poetry," but the flock will not to fold for such insipid provender, or if they do enter the theatrical pen it is only to ba-a! at the shepherd and his collation. This is perhaps allegorizing away too much of the public character. I have been astonished at the interest excited in the breast of the many-headed, by the announce ment of a new tragedy, by the general anxiety to witness its exhibition, by the facility with which every poet can agglomerate a sufficient number of, the author of**, a drama in ears dispassionately to hear his play, and a competent number of tongues satisfactorily to damn it. Does not this afford some proof that taste is not dead in the general palate, but dormant? is not the judicious exercise of it in the negative sense a partial demonstration that it would be exerted with equal discernment in the positive? Let any dramatist of the day just tempt the public with such a play as Julius Cesar, or even Venice Preserved (which is now looked upon as decidedly" a bad thing" by our living tragic-poets), -and if the public reject or condemn it, then let the public be gibbeted as those who have turned the theatre into a riding-house and the stage into a Pandemonium. But it is in truth neither the managers nor the public who have exploded the English drama to make way for the German and Equestrian;-it is the Poets. The real patrons of the quadrupeds are our tragedy-poets: it is they who have danced in the van (crying-Oh, horrible! all the time), while these fourfooted "gentlemen of the sock and buskin" curvetted every step of the way from Astley's to Elliston's. It is they who have led the equestrian troop of performers from Westminster to Vinegar Yard, who have procured engagements for horses, and who have established a squadron of mountebank cavalry on the stage for a prospective eternity. Euge! Well done! philotetrapodal fellows! It is you who deserve well of your country, is it not? You should be presented, each, with a turban of three tails, a leather apron, and a horseshoe, like the primitive Turks of the Selinga, for your negative but efficient patronage of the Equestrian five acts; &c. &c. who paved the way with these their performances for a regiment of horse-players to ride triumphant in Drury Lane! How Pegasus must kick up his heels, in the Muses' paddock, striking out as many Hippocrenes for your drinking as make the hill look like a quagmire! As Demosthenes said (or any one might say), improvisamente, By earth, by all her fountains, streams, and floods, you are glorious gentlemen!—But this is not all: you are likewise patrons, not ostensible, but sub rosa patrons of the Monstrous School of the Drama. Another bow in your bon→ nets. It is you who have conjured up that pestilent fry of reptiles, Germans, and cacodemons, which is nightly set before the devouring eyes of this highly intellectual nation. You are justly put into this active capacity, for the nuisance only exists by your passiveness. Yet I myself, loud as I am upon paper, I myself do not as eloquently reprobate, as sonorously bewail, as tristfully deprecate, as vociferously anathematize, the Germans and Equestrians, the quadrupeds and the monsters, as the least eloquent, sonorous, tristful, vociferous trago-poet of the day! You are all in a tale: What venal dogs are the managers! What tasteless blockheads are the people!-One cries, that he would as soon bestow a good tragedy on the public, as a fine pearl on a pig: I believe him. Another exclaims, that no mixed audience could appreciate his works: he is wrong, for it damned them. A third (a noble poet, now dead and never a dramatist) concludes the total absence of dramatic taste among his countrymen from-mark the infal lible premises, reader! from their insensibility to the dramatic powers of "Joanna Baillie, and Milman, and John Wilson." O Aristotle! There's an enthymeme! I have no taste for the drama because I am blind to the dramatic powers of Miss Baillie, Milman, and Wilson! Three very meritorious persons, but as fit to write dramas for the stage, as the man in the moon to write music for the spheres. In a note to the preface of his Doge of Venice the above mentioned noble author says: "While I was in the sub-committee of Drury Lane Theatre, I can vouch for my colleagues, and I hope for myself, that we did our best to bring back the legitimate drama. I tried what I could to get De Monfort revived, but in vain, and equally in vain in favour of Sotheby's Ivan, which was thought an acting play; and I endeavoured also to wake Mr. Coleridge to write a tragedy." De Mon fort, legitimate drama! Ay, as like as Shakspeare in petticoats to Joanna Baillie in breeches. If any lady could write legitimate drama, Miss Baillie is that lady; but the hypothesis is as baseless as a sick man's dream. So theby's Ivan, an acting play! Pooh! pooh!-But best of all, Mr. Coleridge write a tragedy! Momus! O god of laughter, hear that! "Wake Mr. Coleridge to write a tragedy?" Who ever thought of asking an Eolian lyre to whistle the Dead March in Saul? or a wild reed to blow Rule Britannia? Would any person with brains enough to keep him from walking on all-four (excepting always poets, who have a licence to be foolish) expect a gossamer to fly in a mathematical right line from Durham to Dover?-Such a person would expect Mr. Coleridge to write a regular tragedy; and, in both cases, his hopes would be about equally gratified. Again: Our legitimate tragedies, it is said, bring no houses: And why in the name of necessity should they? Our very best pieces of that description are played to empty benches: Why not, my arithmetician? We have a dozen stock plays, "old stagers" as they may well be called; Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard, Venice Preserved, and a few others. These have been running a perpetual gauntJet of admiration ever since we knew the shape of a horse-shoe; soup for dinner, soup for supper, and soup for dinner again; yet we are expected to swallow it with as much avidity as if it were the first time of dishing! The miracle is, that these sempiternal plays have not been cut short in the midst of their immortality, and that the gods have not long since cried out in plain English Ohe jam satis! when the Madman, the Moor, and the other perennial heroes of our stage have put forth their speech and their noses. But granting that we are tasteless and insensate: Again I ask, whose fault is it? We were not always without taste; the nation was at one time dramatic in its feelings. Why then not re-create that taste, why not renovate those feelings? This is the office of our poets; taste for any art and sensibility to its beauties must originate with the finest spirits of the nation, i. e. (in drama), as they are nowise backward to proclaim themselves, the poets. It is not our part to make them play-writers, but theirs to make us play-goers. What is expected from us? Are we to be ever in the dramatic lune, without any fuel to sustain our ardour? Must we be ever open-mouthed for a tragic morceau, though we have not tasted as much for these last forty years as would satisfy a craving Lilliputian? What is it expected that without why or wherefore we are suddenly to get up as if stung by a tragic oestrus, and having maddened round the whole land of Lud, ransacking every bookseller's shop, and pillaging every poet's pocket, for five-act pieces, we are to cry aloud with a common throat,-More tragedy! More tragedy! More tragedy else we die! Yet this is what they look for who accuse the public of want of taste and relish for the drama. No, my friends; we must have some provocation be fore you can hope to find us in a genuine rage for theatricals. Give us one good tragedy, and you shall have no reason to complain of public apathy for the future. The sum of the matter is this: A tragedy is written, offered, perused, received, rehearsed, puffed, presented, and damned. The managers cry out on the poet, the poet on the public, and the public on both. The managers (after condemnation) pro fess themselves unable to see the wit of the piece, though it is pointed out to them by the author as plain as their own noses. The poet complains of want of taste in the public, though he has just received the very best contradictory proof that his charge is groundless. The public, in fine, call the manager a goose, and the poet-"more than I'll say, or he'd believe." Another tragedy is produced: three acts are suffered to pass over in noiseless tranquillity: no sound whatever, but the drawing of an occasional cork, or the blowing of a solitary nose: but at the close of the fourth, the audience begin to yawn, gape, sneeze, cough, and throw orange-peel at the musicians in the fifth some fall fast asleep, others retire to the lobbies, the the pit begins to squabble; JOHN LACY. REPORT OF MUSIC. ONE great provincial meeting has taken place since our last, which closes the autumnal music of the year, namely, the Edinburgh festival. It was directed by a committee, and conducted by Sir George Smart, and the scale was about equal to that of last year at Liverpool. Miss Stephens, Miss Goodall, and Madame de Begnis, Messrs. Vaughan, Sapio, Phillips, Bellamy, and Signor de Begnis, were originally engaged, but the indisposition of M. Šapio compelled the directors to negociate with Mr. Braham, who attended. The band and chorus numbered under two hundred. We shall not go deeply into the selections, which were of the same character, and, indeed, nearly the same individual pieces which are common to all concerts of such magnitude. Madame de Begnis sang English for the first time, and took Haydn's beautiful song in the Creation, On Mighty Wings (we wish musicians would prefer old Mr. Milton to young Mr. Webbe), which she sang exquisitely, pronouncing the words with great propriety. She also performed Cimarosa's I Sacrifizio d'Abram, with deep pathos and effect. This was on the same morning. At the DEC. 1824. other sacred performances, she took the bravura, Rejoice greatly, in the Messiah, and several other things. Braham, and Signor and Madame de Begnis, carried away the palm; but Miss Stephens, Vaughan, Phillips, and Miss Goodall, were heard with scarcely less delight. The Scotch critics admit that the performances were, as a whole, nearly perfect, and only quarrel with the superabundance of singers; a discovery very sensible as we esteem the matter, but one to which they have probably been led by the balance of the receipts and expenditure, leaving very little for the charities, for whose benefit the festival was instituted. One thing we cannot but remark: the observations made by the press are amongst the most sensible we ever remember to have seen, and indicate, if not a general diffusion of musical science, a very philosophical understanding of the art, and very good taste in the individual authors of those reports. Scotland has but lately been invaded by the passion for exotic music, but she seems to be alive to its fullest enjoyment. Mr. Kalkbrenner gave one Concert at Edinburgh just before the Festival, 2 T |