of London, seems to unite every practical advantage, being very manageable, and exhibiting the result with only two settings of the slider. Accompanied by a barometer of the lightest and and most portable kind, it would prove a very useful implement to the geological traveller. The mountain barometer, which we owe to the zeal of Sir H. Englefield, is tolerably commodious; but a simpler and much lighter instrument might be devised, on the principle of the conical barometer. To multiply the chances of observation is a great object; and in such cases, accuracy may to a moderate degree be sacrificed for convenience. Physical geography would acquire prodigious improvement, if by means of the barometer, sections or profiles of countries were made, and a system of distant levelling conducted in different directions.

Much however still remains to be done. That the temperature decreases uniformly in ascending the atmosphere, is an assumed principle; but the observations of Saussure, compared with those of Humboldt, betray an evident deviation, and prove that the decrements of heat increase in the greater elevations. The manometrical experiments of Roy are far from being unexceptionable. They were made on dry and moist air; a distinction which appears extremely vague. He besides mistook a dilatation produced by the continual addition or solution of humidity, for the usual expansion of air which had been previously damped. On the ingenuity of Mr Dalton, we would bestow unqualified praise but knowing the very rude and imperfect apparatus with which he generally contents himself, we cannot avoid regarding his numerical results as mere conjectural approximations, which often do credit, indeed, to his sagacity. Gay-Lussac has so closely followed Dalton, that their marvellous coincidence, in points hardly susceptible of such nicety, and contradicted by the tenor of more extensive analogies, is not the best calculated to remove all suspicion. We should on this occasion have hazarded a few remarks, if we had not already abused the patience of our readers. When quantities are concerned, it is the most difficult by far to perform accurate experiments; nor is the merit of procuring such results ever fully appreciated. The more improved branches of physical science are hastening to that stage which Astronomy has long attained, where individual exertions are but of little avail; and where, to reach the higher degrees of perfection, the support of powerful associations, or the liberal and efficient patronage of the State, become indispensably necessary.

ᎪᎡᎢ.

ART. XI. Two Plays: Mantuan Revels, a Comedy in Five Acts; and Henry the Seventh, an Historical Tragedy, in Five Acts. By Richard Chenevix, Esq. F. R. & E. S.; M. R. I. A. &c.. 8vo.. pp. 317. London. 1812.

WE

E really begin to suspect that it is not easy to write a tolerable play; and are satisfied, at all events, that it is a great deal more difficult now, than it used to be when tolerable plays were more abundant. The difficulty, however, we conceive, does not arise so much from our predecessors having taken possession of all the good subjects and ways of treating them-for we have unlimited faith in the creative power of genius-as from our increased intolerance of faults that are perhaps inseparable from the higher order of beauties. There are certain extravagances, and blunders and inaccuracies, that are held not to be admissible, upon any terms, in modern compositions; and yet they occur perpetually in these older writings, the beauties of which, with all our refinement and fastidious correctness, we must confess ourselves utterly incapable of imitating. Is it a very rash or unlikely conjecture, then, that our failure may have been owing, in part at least, to our fastidiousness; that we have miscarried by attempting to separate what is inseparable; and have fallen short of the beauties of Shakespeare, principally because we have been too much afraid of falling into his faults? It is certain at least, that our effeminate horror for some classes of defects is always indulged at the expense of some noble quality. If we are always to be scrupulously polite, we must part with some portion of our sincerity;-if we must preserve the delicacy of our complexion, we must be content to give up our robust strength, and perhaps even our courage, and the lofty deportment which belongs to it. The case is still stronger as to the attributes of genius and fancy. Their domain is a mountainous region; not only full of inequalities, but abounding in gulphs and abysses; and in which no one will ever meet the unclouded sun, or breathe the fragrant airs on its summits, who trembles at the accompanying racines, or dreads to soil his feet in the intervening morasses. The sober and anxious frame of mind, in short, which is produced by eschewing little faults, and labouring after petty graces, is quite incompatible with the raised imagination which gives birth to the grander beauties of poetry; nor can we possibly taste the flavour of that enchanted cup, without hazarding its intoxication.

A

The volume before us affords a new exemplification of these recondite truths; and is a new instance of failure in that pur

B

suit of dramatic excellence, in which success would be the greatest of all novelties. Mr Chenevix, however, has other merits besides that of boldness in his attempt; and the work altogether is an object both of interest and curiosity.

Mr Chenevix has long been known as a learned chemist and mineralogist; but we confess, we never heard before of his pretensions in the capacity of a poet. He is also understood to have resided a great deal abroad, and to have acquired a thorough knowledge of the taste and literary attainments of the different nations of the Continent. If we had ever regarded him as a likely competitor for poetical fame, therefore, we should certainly have apprehended that he would have joined himself to that learned and accomplished band, who exclaim against the peculiarities of our native poetry, and find matter for little but ridicule in the peculiarities of our native drama. Our agreeable surprise at seeing him start up in the character of a poet, therefore, was not a little enhanced by finding him take his place as a professed idolater of our antient dramatists; and, so far from being disposed to treat their peculiarities with irreverence, as actually to have hazarded the rejection of very weighty pretensions to public favour by the excess of his admiration.

The two plays contained in this volume may be regarded, we think, as the boldest, the most elaborate, and, upon the whole, the most successful imitation of the general style, taste and diction of our older dramatists, that has appeared in the present times. The general tune and structure of the verse, and the cast and character of the language, indeed, appear to us to be very perfectly copied; and even the more substantial peculiarities of the composition, in so far at least as relates to the utter disregard of the unities-the free mixture of lowness and familiarity the profusion of violent metaphors-and the occasional interchange of bombast and buffoonery, seem to be imitated with very laudable fidelity. The misfortune is, that there is no powerful passion-no living trait of character no simple and original touches of sentiment and universal feeling no new and yet familiar picture of life and manners nothing, in short, of the greater elements that give its tenderness or its terror to the matchless poetry of Shakespeare, and not only redeem, but sanctify all the errors of his taste and all the extravagancies of his fancy. These loftier attributes we do not think indeed that Mr Chenevix has even attempted to imitate. He has taken his pitch, as it appears to us, from the idle and more fantastical passages in Shakespeare, where, in the absence of strong passion or commanding character, those legitimate masters of the dra

ma, imagination and ingenuity, are allowed to play their vagaries and scatter their flowers, and to fill the vacant scene with their ostentatious and artificial exhibitions. Now, however graceful these may appear when they are offered merely as interludes, or preluding flourishes to the deeper harmony of the piece, it is obvious that a whole play, composed entirely in that taste, must be equally unimpressive and unnatural; and that such a profusion of mere gratuitous ornament, must not only lose its effect, but produce a feeling of disappointment, when presented without its weightier accompaniments. These eternal tropes and figures of speech, in short-these turns of phrase and sudden strains of thought and of language, are but poor substitutes for the interest of a story sustained by the glow of passion, and the magical presentment of characters,-though they may relieve the intervals of their action, or set off the tamer scenes of their development. Detached from these, however, they seem to lose their great charm in losing their propriety; and, like the minute and fautastical embellishments of Gothic architecture, which have a wonderful effect in enriching the vast and solemn piles to which they are appropriate, are no sooner presented apart, than they become positively displeasing, by the laborious littleness, the hardness, and complexity of their

execution.

Such, however, is the style in which the pieces before us seem to us to be wholly composed. Every sentence exhibits some small detached prettiness in thought or in diction. The whole dialogue is carried on in metaphors and forced turns of expression; and the author proceeds, through the whole piece, by short flights and irregular starts of fancy, without once being borne away by genuine passion, or permitting himself to be carried along by the smooth current of simplicity. Accordingly, he is never, by any accident, direct or natural for a single instant; and though his conceptions are often striking, and still oftener ingenious, there is such an appearance of artifice in the whole structure of the style, that the reader is at last both wearied and disappointed. This, however, is by no means the worst of his peculiarities. The perpetual recurrence of metaphor, and the attempt to copy the boldness and originality of the metaphors employed by Shakespeare, render him very often obscure, and, to say the truth, not unfrequently altogether unintelligible to our weak faculties. The whole dialogue, in short, is a series of enigmas; one half of which, we verily believe, might defy the solution of ordinary readers; and thus not only is the attention kept perpetually on the strain, in order to have a chance for discovering the meaning of the author, but

certain feeling of indifference and provocation is excited toward the persons of the drama who thus persist in talking in parables and dark sentences, instead of honestly speaking out their minds to the spectators and each other. It is owing partly to this extravagant use of figurative language, and partly to the frequent introduction of obsolete words and combinations, that the sense frequently becomes so questionable as to make it necessary to recolfect that we are reading the works of a living author, printed under his own inspection-not to exclaim against the hallucinations of ignorant transcribers and editors, and to set our critical sagacity to work in conjectural emendations of a text that seems so manifestly corrupted. For this reason alone, if there were no other, we are satisfied that these plays never will become popular; and though the admirers of Shakespeare will always listen, not merely with indulgence but delight, to any thing that reminds them of his manner, and the fanciers of poetical images receive with gratitude any addition to their collection, we are afraid that the great proportion of those whose suffrages ultimately dispose of reputation, will not exempt this volume from the common doom of mortality which has gone out against almost all our contemporary dramatists.

Such as they are, however, we think that the merits and demerits of those plays are all in their diction; and that if they do not succeed as collections of little pieces of poetry, and ingenious imitations of the style of our old dramatists, there is but little chance of their succeeding on account of the contrivance of their story, or the interest that is excited by their characters. We do not believe, indeed, that the author has any serious pretensions in that way; and are persuaded that he intended them, and especially the first, rather as exercises in diction, and vehicles for the studied expression of a few favourite conceptions, than as specimens of dramatic invention, or examples of force and originality in the delineation of character.

The first piece, which is entitled' Mantuan Revels, a Comedy,' has nothing in the least comical or ludicrous in its whole compass, except the very dull and ill executed buffoonery of the servants. The rest is mostly in blank verse-and abundantly serious and e ven tragical in its substance. It has a double plot; and is made up of two very old and well known stories:-one of a man who, by the help of a mask, is made to marry a lady whom he had de serted, instead of one whom he is attempting to seduce; and the other of a whimsical husband, who insists upon his friend putting his wife's virtue to the proof, and rages upon a mistaken idea of her corruption. Both of these deluded persons resolve to revenge themselves on their blameless spouses; and both, er