checked and crippled; the strength of ge. nerations had been wasted, and the immense extent of the empire only served yet more to sustain the general peace, from the exhaustion of its forces. The defeat of Xerxes paralysed the East. Thus, Greece was left secure, and at liberty to enjoy the tranquillity it had acquired, and to direct to the arts of peace the novel and amazing energies which had been prompted by the dangers, and exalted by the victories, of war. "The Athenians, now returned to their city, saw before them the arduous task of rebuilding its ruins, and restoring its wasted lands. The vicissitudes of the war had produced many silent and internal, as well as exterior, changes. Many great fortunes had been broken; and the ancient spirit of the aristocracy had received no inconsiderable shock in the power of new families; the fame of the base-born and democratic Themistoclesand the victories which a whole people had participated-broke up much of the prescriptive and venerable sanctity attached to ancestral names, and to particular families. This was salutary to the spirit of enterprise in all classes. The ambition of the great was excited to restore, by some active means, their broken fortunes and decaying influence-the energies of the humbler ranks, already aroused by their new importance, were stimulated to maintain and to increase it. It was the very crisis in which a new direction might be given to the habits and the character of a whole people; and to seize all the advantages of that crisis, FATE, in Themistocles, had allotted to Athens, a man whose qua lities were not only pre-eminently great in themselves, but peculiarly adapted to the circumstances of the time. And, as I have elsewhere remarked, it is indeed the nature and prerogative of free states, to concentrate the popular will into something of the unity of despotism, by producing, one after another, a series of representatives of the wants and exigencies of The Hour-each leading his generation, but only while he sympathizes with its will;—and either baffling or succeeded by his rivals, not in proportion as he excels or he is outshone in genius, but as he gives, or ceases to give, to the widest range of the legislative power, the most concentrated force of the executive; thus uniting the desires of the greatest number, under the administration of the narrowest possible control;-the constitution popular— the government absolute but responsible." Now, in this splendid passage is to be seen a luminous specimen of the view taken of the most memorable events in history by the liberal writers. In his reflections on this heartstirring event, in his observations on the glorious defeat of the arms of Eastern despotism by the infant efnothing said of the incalculable conforts of European freedom, there is sequences dependent on the strugglenothing on the evident protection afforded by a superintending Providence to the arms of an inconsiderable Republic-nothing on the marvellous adaptation of the character of Themistocles to the mighty duty with which he was charged, that of rolling back from the cradle of civilisation, freedom and knowledge, the wave of barbaric conquests. It was FATE which raised him up! Against such a view of human affairs we enter our solemn protest. We allow nothing to fate, unless that is meant as another way of expressing the decrees of an overruling, all-seeing, and beneficent intelligence. We see in the defeat of the mighty armament by the arms of a small city on the Attic shore-in the character of its leaders-in the efforts which it made-in the triumphs which it achieved, and the glories which it won-the clearest evidence of the agency of a superintending power, which elicited, from the collision of Asiatic ambition with European freedom, the wonders of Grecian civilisation, and the marvels of Athenian genius. And it is just because we are fully alive to the important agency of the democratic element in this memorable conflict; because we see clearly what inestimable blessings, when duly restrained, it is capable of bestowing on mankind; because we trace in its energy in every succeeding age the expansive force which has driven the blessings of civithat we are the determined enemies lisation into the recesses of the earth, of those democratic concessions which entirely destroy the beneficent agency of this powerful element, which permit the vital heat of society to burst forth in ruinous explosions, or tear to atoms the necessary superincumbent masses, and instead of the smiling aspect of early and cherished vegetation, leave only in its traces the blackness of desolation and the ruin of nature. THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. No. IX. THAT Liston is an excellent actor, all agree; that he thinks of leaving the stage, all regret; that he has made a competence, all are glad to hear; but that he is overcome with modesty, we thought had hitherto never occurred to any one. However, we were mistaken; for it has just occurred to a correspondent of one of the papers. This discoverer forewarns the public, that the next time they shall see him, he is to be overwhelmed with sudden blushes, and to weep, by particular desire. The letter tells us, that Liston, who left Covent Garden boards in 1823, returns there for one night more; but, as the writer, with pathetic pleasantry, and pleasant pathos, says," It is supposed by his friends that he returns only to finish his glorious theatrical career." The letter proceeds to give one of those touches of the historic broom by which the concealing cobwebs are swept away from the fame of men. It tells us that Liston was born in London in 1776, and first appeared at the Haymarket in June 1805. That he has always believed himself too nervous to take a formal farewell; and even now dreads being called on to appear at the end of a play. Therefore, adds the writer, "It is to be hoped that on Friday next this useless, and in his case painful ceremony, will be dispensed with." We never doubted Liston's power of merriment, and are the less surprised that he should be merry in the newspapers. Of course the announcement that he is to finish the part of Looney Mactwowlter or Paul Pry, by the part of "Niobe all tears," for that night only, will add prodigiously to the audience, and swell the bill of the Farce by a "new attraction." That a clever fellow who has faced all kinds of audiences, in all kinds of parts, and with all kinds of oddities, for thirty years, should feel a sudden timidity at the sight of pit, box, and gallery huzzaing him, is a paradox. That he should feel a pang in the waving of a pockethandkerchief, horror in a hearty laugh, or agony in "three distinct rounds of applause," is to us among the mysteries of human nature; a phenomenon as remarkable as his own physiognomy-a problem "too deep for tears," an evidence of virgin sensibility surviving the smell of lamp-oil and orange-peel," as poor Matthews defined the theatrical atmosphere, unrivalled in the annals of the Minerva library. He It is our personal opinion, that Liston intends to amuse himself, and still more amuse his audience, by a burlesque of the customary leave-taking, and instead of "sending his hearers weeping to their beds," or poisoning the air with the odour of hartshorn, and startling the ear with the sound of hysterics, will keep the multitude laughing at him, for him, and by him, to the fall of the curtain. Liston is undoubtedly a loss to the stage. had great humour, yet of a peculiar kind. He had neither the broad pleasantry with which Munden exerted such irresistible power over the audience, nor the graceful pleasantry that made Jack Bannister the most delightful of comedians. His talent was dry humour. Those who see nothing in an actor but his visage, said that he had the most humorous of all visages, and were prepared to laugh when he twisted a muscle. But his face was certainly the mere instrument of an ingenious mind. It was actually heavy. It had neither the flexible mouth that we see pit-pat made for jest, nor the voluble eye that the great dramatist describes, "like parrots winking at a bagpiper." But, as the instrument of an inventive drollery, it was characteristic. Liston was rather a humorist than a man of humour. There was a quaint force in his conception that as often made one think as smile; and a dexterous byplay which seldom left the audience aware of the skill to which their delight in his performance was due. But neither he, nor any of the chief actors of our day, have had a fair trial within the last twenty years. The stage has produced too little of force or novelty to give them the field for true talent; it has abandoned the strong pungency of English character for the feeble affectations of foreign life, and thus, instead of native opulence, given us foreign beggary. It is altogether untrue to say, that our stage has been driven to feed on those husks by the famine of English character. Those who say this palpably think that the coat is the man, and that the uniformity of costumes can extinguish the original diversities of profession, propensity, and mind. Such thinkers would have us believe that there is neither folly nor wisdom existing except through the taste of the tailor; and that the quackery of physic, the presumption of law, the ostentation of soldiership, the avarice of commerce, the adulation of courts, the vanity of fashion, the vulgarity of the parvenu; all the peculiar follies, and tangible exaggerations of life are lost since the day when the streets were a masquerade of full-bottomed wigs, squareskirted coats, and rolled-up stockings. They cannot see which folly runs ahead in the grand race of national absurdities, except by the colour of the jockeys' caps and jackets. To such critics the whole feast of public oddity is a feast with all the dishes covered. Their eye is baffled by the indiscriminate show of the outside, and they judiciously determine that there can be no variety in the viands within. But the question arises. To what is the true deficiency of stage authorship owing? We say not to the public. Whenever the theatres exhibit any thing worth going to see, the public crowd the theatre. Not to the national failure of ability? In the vigour which the British mind exhibits in every pursuit, in the countless avenues which it finds or makes for fame, and in the natural propensity of the Englishman for the study of character, we see an inexhaustible mine of comic power, if the mine were but worked. In the profound sensibilities of a people, the most sensitive though the least ostentatious in their feelings of any on earth, we have as little doubt that the noblest ore of tragedy is only waiting to be brought to the surface. Why, then, have we not both comedy and tragedy? The reason unquestionably is-Because neither is solicited by that especial encouragement which is essential to both. Both are especial works of genius. One requiring the quick wit, the keen insight into human eccentricities, and the forcible construction of story, which are never to be found in their highest grade, but in the highest orders of invention. The other absolutely hopeless, without the daring originality, the living conception of human impulses, and the poctic eloquence, which by common consent are born of consummate ability alone. But genius is proverbially shy, fastidious, and easily disconcerted. If it rises higher than the ordinary step of men, it is only the more exposed to waver and feel at once the force and the chill of gusts that would pass unregarded across the path of the thousands below. A slight repulse has often thrown a man of this rank of mind wholly off his balance, has made him relinquish the favourite pursuit of years, and exaggerating the nature of his failure with the same keen sensibility which fevered his spirit in the enterprise, he resolves, like another Prospero, to abandon the fairy isle where he so long reigned alone, break his wand, and return to the ordinary haunts and commonplace career of general mankind. Nor is the fault wholly that of managers. They are a struggling class of men. Within the last half century, none of them have been able to do more than fight ill luck from season to season. A long succession of them have been ruined altogether; and a late manager, whose amateur propensities plunged him into the hazardous amusement of governing a theatre, is said to have paid L.30,000 as the penalty of his experience. What, then, is to be the resource? Or are we to relinquish all the advantages which might redound to a civilized people from a well-ordered national theatre? We altogether disregard the ridiculous outcry raised against theatres from their abuse; and, so long as we have Shakspeare, can rejoice that we had a theatre to summon that mighty genius into action, and still have a theatre to spread the splendours of his mind through the people and posterity. The first step, as we conceive, would be to form some public body for the express encouragement of the drama. We have a Royal Academy for painting; we have half a hundred associations for all kinds of public efforts, from the dreary drudgeries of geology, up to the noblest researches of science. Why not establish a society for the direct promotion of dramatic authorship-to give rewards for the ablest comedy and tragedy; to spread dramatic knowledge, to purify dramatic taste; to exercise the mild influence of opinion over the conduct of actors, authors, and managers alike, and without harshness or officiousness, have all the effect of a powerful and salutary jurisdiction? The object is certainly worth the trial. The literary ambition of Swift was to found an academy for the purification of the national language. The noblest trophy that Louis XIV. raised in the height of his power, and the only fragment of his fame which survived himself, was the French Academy, whose chief exploit was the Dictionary of the national language. Yet we suffer the most brilliant, most effectual, and most permanent, popular, and universal of all the efforts of genius to lie in utter neglect; struggling into an abortive existence under the difficulties of bankrupt theatres and bitter criticism, wholly unprotected by the natural patronage of the higher orders, almost wholly unknown to the people, and thus absolutely decaying out of the land. To undertake this duty and remove this stigma, should be the work of the opulent, the intelligent, and the patriotic of the nobility of England. It would well become Lord Francis Egerton, for instance, and individuals of his tastes and opportunities. Many would join them; and a society would be formed, which might become rapidly one of the ornaments of the country. Doubtless they would find a vast quantity of feeble writing poured in upon them in the first instance. This is the natural result of the long neglect of the dra ma, and also—and the remark is worth making of the strong propensity of the people to dramatize. But a few months would exhaust the influx, and then the stream would begin to run pure. Writers who now shrink from the entré of the pursuit, who know nothing of the means of access, or who have been disgusted with the difficulties of theatric negotiation, would be found, delighted to follow the impulse of their minds, when the fruit of that impulse was to be placed in the hands of men of rank and estimation, actuated simply by the wish to raise the fallen dramatic fame of this singularly dramatic country. We cordially hope that the experiment will be made. We can answer for its success. Halfa-dozen years would not elapse without producing a total change in every matter connected with the national drama, stimulating the latent poetry of England into vividness and beauty, and repeopling the deserted hills of national literature with shapes not unworthy to move even among the colossal heroes and demigods of Shak speare. But, to revert for a moment to the fact that our best actors have not had a fair field for their display, we affirm that the failure of authorship is the true cause of the comparative failure of stage ability. The most vivid actor is but little less than a puppet, without a vivid part. He may look the character, but it is the author who must give him the power to speak it. No pleasantry of the performer can fully struggle against native dulness in the play, and no originality in the performer can make an audience find perpetual novelty in perpetual repetition. In fact, all our comedies are worn out; and, except Shakspeare's, no tragedies are now ever capable of being performed. Repetition even in those cannot extinguish the beauties, but it has palled the delight; and the actor's fame perishes under the forced sameness of the exhibition. If we should once again see the revival of talent in the drama, we should forget our complaints against the decay of talent in the actors. While the temple is in ruins, who can wonder at the listlessness of the priests? Like the old and fine superstition of the Greeks, the cutting down of the forest not merely stripped the land of its noblest ornament, but exiled the whole host of nymphs and sylvans-made the night no longer vocal with sounds of unearthly harmony, and extinguished the purple wavings of the thousand pinions that once bore the forms of beauty and inspiration among its dewy haunts and caverns of solemn shade. It might be a curious question for metaphysicians-if metaphysics ever settled any thing-why credulity exercises such singular power over man? If there be one fact more notorious than another, it is, that the future is wholly beyond human knowledge. That no man can determine the events of the morrow, has amounted to a truism since the beginning of the world; and yet, in defiance of the most perfect proof on the subject, there has always been a strong inclination to believe that the events of not only the morrow, but of years to come, and even of a whole life, can be determined. And, to make the anomaly stronger still, this determination is not to be fixed on the wisdom of the wise, but on the ignorance of the ignorant. Where we disdain the philosopher, we trust the gipsy; where we laugh at the man of experience, we rely on the babblings of an old woman: just as our forefathers scoffed at the statesman, and believed the astrologer. Last month a prophecy shook the good town of Halifax "from its propriety," by threatening it with utter ruin. It was not to be massacre by a French invasion, nor cannibalism by an Irish one. Napoleon was not to rise from his dust to inflict vengeance upon the loyalty of the Tories, nor Dan O'Connell to smite the Radicals for having refused to make him "representative of all England." The destruction was to come in the shape of the Sodom and Gomorrah penalties. First there was to be an earthquake of the most sweeping and effectual order. By this all above ground was to be shattered to pieces, from the mirror in the house of the mayor to the pane in the cobbler's stall. Then was to come the second unwelcome visitor, in the shape of a thunder storm, not merely the "most terrible in the memory of the oldest inhabitant," according to the established formula on those occasions, but one which was to prevent any appeal to the past, or moral for the future, by roasting every soul that was caught above ground. The finale was to be finished by a shower that would have carried away Mont Blanc, if it had happened to be in the neighbourhood, but, of course, would make short work with the crackling ruins and burnt bones of the Halifax houses and householders. The prophecy, formidable as it was, came from a source which deepened all its terrors. It was from a pauper in the county workhouse. We have not ascertained whether he was not blind, deaf, and dumb. But if he were, this oracle would have been only the more worthy of public acceptation; if the man had been an idiot, additional force would naturally have been given to his authority. But if he had been frantic and the actual wearer of a strait waistcoat, it would have justified a general insurance of bills, making of leases, and borrowing of money. As it was, the effect was solemn. As the day approached, a new face of virtue was very properly visible over the whole town. Butchers' meat fell a penny in the pound, and the pound itself seemed suddenly to enlarge in its dimensions. The loaf assumed a new whiteness, along with a new magnitude. Several coteries of old ladies declined attending the card table. The Temperance Society received an accession of members, and drew up a resolution, that in future none but rain water should be used in their tea, as being the most celestial. The new corporation bought a prayer-book, and the mayor carried a proposal, in full conclave, that they should attend the parish church on the Sunday ensuing, if they survived. Va rious husbands were reconciled to their wives. Several gentlemen of advanced years and good repute repaired to the Surrogate for licenses, in which they inserted the names of their housekeep ers. Several solicitors spontaneously docked several bills of cost of peculiar longitude. Two dissenters acknowledged that half a farthing in the pound was not a ruinous sum to pay to the church-rate; and one dissenter actually paid it to the amount of sixpence halfpenny. Still, as in all cases prevention is better than cure, and virtue is difficult, where multitudes are concerned, the expedient most in favour was flight. Numbers, as the day approached, shook off the dust of their feet against Halifax, prepared to see the catastrophe on cheaper terms than total conversion, and escaped with all speed from the devoted town. The unfortunate theatre, the common scapegoat of the Simon Pures, without which we should have lost so many terrific specimens of street eloquence from the itinerant, and so many drowsy declamations from the stationary, and without which we should have lost Shakspeare too, a trifle in comparison, was utterly abandoned. Mrs Wail-it's ominous name, well known for her various kinds of captivation, offered them in vain. Taste was vanquished by terror-the love of song gave way to the love of life-the minstrel was left like the nightingale to tell his sorrows to darkness and solitude-and the theatre closed its doors in despair. Washington Irving, after gleaning the romance of Europe, is now indefatigably labouring at the romance of |