It affords me great pleasure to find that your efforts to bring the fine arts into notice at Philadelphia, have been countenanced by the legislature of Pennsylvania, in granting you a part of their house of assembly as a repository for your museum. It is a circumstance highly honourable to you, and is a lasting record of the munificence of that respectable body, and satisfies the opinion I had previously entertained of their zeal to cherish useful knowledge among their fellow citizens.

These are, my dear sir, the characteristics of a wise people, and I hope, that the fostering hand, and liberal direction of that wisdom, will be extended to every degree of useful and popular ingenuity. It is by such acts that a nation is transmitted to posterity with an elevation and distinction of glory, that renders its memory honourable to future ages.

Your communication respecting your son being about to embark again for France, and to study painting, and collect the portraits of eminent men in that country as well as in other parts of Europe, gives me sincere pleasure; I honour his enterprise; but I hope he will, when surrounded by the great examples which are now at Paris, of Grecian and Italian art, I hope he will direct his mind to what are their real, and immutable excellencies, and reflect upon the dignity which they give to man, and to the countries where they were produced. Although I am friendly to portraying eminent men, I am not friendly to the indiscriminate waste of genius in portrait painting; and I do hope that your son will ever bear in his mind, that the art of painting has powers to dignify man, by transmitting to posterity his noble actions, and his mental powers, to be viewed in those invaluable lessons of religion, love of country, and morality; such subjects are worthy of the pencil, they are worthy of being placed in view as the most instructive records to a rising generation. And as an artist, I hope he will bear in his mind, that correctness of outline, and the justness of character in the human figure are eternal; all other points are variable, all other points are in a degree subordinate and

indifferent-such as colour, manners and customs: they are the marks of various nations; but the form of man has been fixed by eternal laws, and must therefore be immutable. It was to those points that the philosophical taste of the Greek artists was directed; and their figures produced on those principles have no room for improvement, their excellencies are eternal. All other things form a humble part; to speak with due reverence of that moral fabric which the hand of Almighty Wisdom has designed; and which is destined to be coeval with inanimate nature, so long as years are permitted to the works of man; and so long as the reverential care of posterity can preserve them; such objects in art will ever be held by a wise people, as the ultimatum in art, and of human capacity, and cherished to the latest posterity as such.

The foregoing observations on the importance of patronage to cherish the fine arts-and of their high importance of distinction in civilized nations, I have a satisfaction in laying before you, as my observations on them for the last fifty years. And I am with every mark of respect for your distinguished exertion to promote useful knowledge,

My dear Sir,

Your greatly obliged friend,

Mr. CHARLES W. PEALE.

BENJ'N WEST.

TRAVELS IN FRANCE-FOR THE PORT FOLIO..

LETTER LXX.

IT is fortunate for the dramatic literature of France, that some of their greatest poets have written for the stage, an advantage you will be the more struck with, if you represent to yourself the correct taste and concentrated good sense of Pope, his command of language, and knowledge of the human heart, connected with such other attainments as might have qualified him for writing a play. That tenderness which breathes in the complaints of Eloisa, that experience which could distinguish and appreciate, and that power of words which could express every incident of life, and every form of passion, might have raised a rival to the Phedre of Racine, or the Zaire of Voltaire. It is another fortunate circumstance, that there have always been theatres in Paris of inferior size and less expensive admittance, where such pieces might be represented as the grosser taste of the lower orders of society required, while the principal theatre, called, by way of distinction, the French theatre, was kept free from profanation. The origin of theatrical amusements was probably the same in England and France. The wandering minstrels began, and the clergy, who were jealous of such large audiences, improved upon the plan, as they supposed, of these sons of pleasure, and contrived to instruct and to amuse at the same time, by their exhibition of mysteries, and miracle plays. The drama, however, soon assumed a more worldly appearance, and the poets of both nations borrowed freely from their neighbours the Spaniards, giving into complicated plots and intrigues of difficult comprehension, which those of the one nation have remained too much attached to, and those of the other have perhaps deviated from too widely. Addison has very well explained, in the Spectator, the particular improprieties of the English stage, as contrasted with the decency and decorum of the French; but this very attention to propriety has been also productive of some defects, and perfection might probably, as in most cases, be found in a just medium between the two.

Voltaire, who, without the correctness of Racine, or the Roman soul of Corneille, and who never perhaps reached the depth of tragic horror as successfully as Crebillon, has succeeded more generally than either of them, owes his success in great measure to his acquaintance with English literature, and with the works of Shakspeare in particular. The short dialogue of Edmund and of Edgar, and the preparation for the duel in King Lear, have given rise to one of the finest passages of Tancrede. The closet-scene between Hamlet and his mother

has taught the French poet how to render the character of Clytemnestra infinitely more interesting in his tragedy of Oreste. Mortimer brought forth by his keepers, in Henry the Fourth, with some hints from another English play, has given rise to the pathetic scene of Lusignan recovering his children; nor could he ever have written his favourite play of Zaire, had he never read Othello. He has there ventured to make a lover stab his mistress and afterwards himself upon the stage, and has even ventured in his Semiramis to introduce a ghost, who was very well received, though no ghost ever rose to so little purpose, for he gives no information, and contributes in no degree to the catastrophe. The effect of the apparition is weakened too by its taking place, not in silence and in solitude, as where the shade of the murdered king tells the sad story to his son in Shakspeare, but before great numbers, and in a very public place. There is no sentiment perhaps, no turn of passion, no pathetic situation, which may not have been as well described and expressed in some English as in any French poet; but if a tragedy is to be considered as a production worthy in every sense of being presented to a refined, intelligent audience, the comparison is, I think, very much in favour of the latter nation.

There is more equality perhaps in the comic productions of these great rivals in arts as well as arms. English comedy is, indeed, too often coarse and licentious, and when not deserving those epithets, is yet to be blamed for pictures of human life which convey no good lesson, and for allusions to circumstances which should not be called into view. It is, however, very frequently, a just representation of human nature; while that of the French, in very superior language, with more attention to inculcate decency, and with drollery and wit, gives but an inaccurate view of society, and such, indeed as I believe never existed. Nothing can be more perfect than the delineation is, upon the French stage, of a single character—a miser, a jealous man, a coxcomb, a coquette, or a clown; but their adherence to the unities of time and place renders it unavoidable that individuals should be brought together in a way in which it is impossible they ever could have lived; and the received opinion, that love is a necessary ingredient in every play, introduces a sort of courtship very like seduction, and altogether foreign to French manners. With respect to the unity of place, I cannot conceive why, if we so far get the better of our conviction, as to suppose, for an hour or two, that the actors and actresses are gentlemen and ladies, or heroes and princesses of other countries and of other days, and that the time employed in the representation is equal to four and twenty hours, why we may not, I say, go a step further, and suppose that the personages before us have

time enough to go from one house, or even from one town to another. The Chinese, who are a very wise people, get over the difficulty very ingeniously. The character whom we are soon to figure to ourselves as in a very distant place, gives notice to the audience that he is going a journey, and very gravely getting astride his bamboo, and smacking his whip, he performs it in their presence, by galloping two or three times round the stage, and then gives notice of his arrival. With all the merit of French tragedy, there is sometimes, when the scene is laid in distant times and distant countries, an approximation to mo dern manners and to French customs which is absurd; and as in their comedy there is always too much stress laid upon the omnipotence of love, Voltaire has ventured, in one or two instances, to write a tragedy in which no part of the distress arises from this universal cause ; but he has, on all other occasions, yielded to the general opinion, as Corneille, Racine, and Crebillon had done before him; an opinion which is certainly productive of very great inconsistencies. I can easily conceive that Mithridates, though far in the decline of life, and broken by misfortunes, had still enough of love in his disposition to be jealous of his wives, and we know from Plutarch what barbarous orders he gave respecting them; but I cannot bring myself to admit, that this great king could, in the midst of his magnanimous designs against the Romans, and when their legions were within a day's march of his capital, have been occupied about a Grecian beauty, and practising a trick, like Mr. Lovegold, to find out whether she loved his son or not. Nor can I bear that Sertorius, at the age of sixty, and whom I know to have had but one eye, or Philoctetes, after twenty years of retreat, and in all the anguish of an incurable wound, should be making declarations of love; that Cæsar should make so insipid a speech as to say, that he had fought at Pharsalia for the bright eyes of Cleopatra, or that the gloomy inexorable Electra should mingle her groans of vengeance against the murderer of her father with sighs for the charms and graces of the murderer's son.

I have already mentioned to you the most distinguished writers of tragedy in the French language. Those of comedy are more numerous; and I am sorry that you cannot judge for yourself of the truth and decency of Destouches, the gayety of Regnard, the wit of Lesage, the originality of Dufresny, the lively natural dialogue of Dancourt, and the affecting representations of La Chaussée. This last is considered in France as the inventor of a species of dramatic composition very common in the English language, but unknown before his time to the French; a composition the scenes of which are taken from common life, and which, without being as gay as comedy, or as distressing as tragedy, may be said to partake of the nature of both. In enume