satisfying the reader, that all is complete, and that nothing is to follow. The performance is even dated. It finishes like an epistle, giving us the place and time of writing; but then giving them in such a manner as they ought to come from Virgil.' But to open our thoughts into a further detail. As the poem from its very name respects various matters relative to land, (Georgica,) and which are either immediately or mediately connected with it; among the variety of these matters the poem begins from the lowest, and thence advances gradually from higher to higher, till having reached the highest, it there properly stops. The first book begins from the simple culture of the earth, and from its humblest progeny, corn, legumes, flowers, &c." It is a nobler species of vegetables which employs the second book, where we are taught the culture of trees, and, among others, of that important pair, the olive and the vine." Yet it must be remembered, that all this is nothing more than the culture of mere vegetable and inanimate nature. It is in the third book that the poet rises to nature sensitive and animated, when he gives us precepts about cattle, horses, sheep, &c.° At length, in the fourth book, when matters draw to a conclusion, then it is he treats his subject in a moral and political way. He no longer pursues the culture of the mere brute nature; he then describes, as he tells us, Mores, et studia, et populos, et prælia, &c. For such is the character of his bees, those truly social and political animals. It is here he first mentions arts, and memory, and laws, and families. It is here (their great sagacity considered) he supposes a portion imparted of a sublimer principle. It is here that every thing vegetable or merely brutal seems forgotten, while all appears at least human, and sometimes even divine. His quidam signis, atque hæc exempla secuti, Georg. iv. 219. When the subject will not permit him to proceed further, he suddenly conveys his reader, by the fable of Aristæus, among nymphs, heroes, demi-gods, and gods, and thus leaves him in company, supposed more than mortal. This is not only a sublime conclusion to the fourth book, See Philosophical Arrangements, page 336. m These are implied by Virgil in the first line of his first book, and in every other part of it, the Episodes and Epilogue excepted. This too is asserted at the beginning of his first book, Ulmisque adjungere vites, and is the entire subject of the second, the same exceptions made as before. • This is the third subject mentioned in the Proeme, and fills (according to just order) the entire third book, making the same exceptions as before. but naturally leads to the conclusion of the whole work; for he does no more after this than shortly recapitulate, and elegantly blend his recapitulating with a compliment to Augustus. But even this is not all. The dry didactic character of the Georgics made it necessary they should be enlivened by episodes and digressions. It has been the art of the poet, that these episodes and digressions should be homogeneous; that is, should so connect with the subject, as to become (as it were) parts of it. On these principles every book has for its end, what I call an epilogue; for its beginning, an invocation; and for its middle, the several precepts relative to its subject, I mean husbandry. Having a beginning, a middle, and an end, every part itself becomes a smaller whole, though with respect to the general plan it is nothing more than a part. Thus the human arm, with a view to its elbow, its hand, its fingers, &c. is as clearly a whole, as it is simply but a part with a view to the entire body. The smaller wholes of this divine poem may merit some attention; by these I mean each particular book. Each book has an invocation. The first invokes the sun, the moon, the various rural deities, and, lastly, Augustus; the second invokes Bacchus; the third, Pales and Apollo; the fourth, his patron Mæcenas. I do not dwell on these invocations, much less on the parts which follow, for this, in fact, would be writing a comment upon the poem. But the epilogues, besides their own intrinsic beauty, are too much to our purpose to be passed in silence. In the arrangement of them, the poet seems to have pursued such an order, as that alternate affections should be alternately excited; and this he has done, well knowing the importance of that generally acknowledged truth, "the force derived to contraries by their juxta-position or succession." The first book ends with those portents and prodigies, both upon earth and in the heavens, which preceded the death of the dictator Cæsar. To these direful scenes the epilogue of the second book opposes the tranquillity and felicity of the rural life, which (as he informs us) faction and civil discord do not usually impair: Non res Romanæ, perituraque regna. In the ending of the third book we read of a pestilence, and of nature in devastation; in the fourth, of nature restored, and, by help of the gods, replenished. As this concluding epilogue (I mean the fable of Aristæus) occupies the most important place, so is it decorated accordingly with language, events, places, and personages. No language was ever more polished and harmonious. The descent of Aristaus to his mother, and of Orpheus to the shades, P See before, p. 401, 402. are events; the watery palace of the Nereids, the cavern of Proteus, and the scene of the infernal regions, are places; Aristæus, old Proteus, Orpheus, Eurydice, Cyllene and her nymphs, are personages; all great, all striking, all sublime. प Let us view these epilogues in the poet's order: 1. Civil horrors; 2. Rural tranquillity; 3. Nature laid waste; 4. Nature restored. Here, as we have said already, different passions are, by the subjects being alternate, alternately excited; and yet withal excited so judiciously, that, when the poem concludes, and all is at an end, the reader leaves off with tranquillity and joy. From the Georgics of Virgil we proceed to the Menexenus of Plato; the first being the most finished form of a didactic poem, the latter, the most consummate model of a panegyrical oration. The Menexenus is a funeral oration in praise of those brave Athenians who had fallen in battle by generously asserting the cause of their country. Like the Georgics, and every other just composition, this oration has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is a solemn account of the deceased having received all the legitimate rights of burial, and of the propriety of doing them honour not only by deeds, but by words; that is, not only by funeral ceremonies, but by a speech, to perpetuate the memory of their magnanimity, and to recommend it to their posterity as an object of imitation. As the deceased were brave and gallant men, we are shewn by what means they came to possess their character, and what noble exploits they performed in consequence. Hence the middle of the oration contains, first, their origin; next, their education and form of government; and last of all, the consequence of such an origin and education; their heroic achievements from the earliest days to the time then present." The middle part being thus complete, we come to the conclusion; which is, perhaps, the most sublime piece of oratory, both for the plan and execution, which is extant of any age, or in any language. By an awful prosopopoeia, the deceased are called up to address the living; the fathers, slain in battle, to exhort their living children; the children, slain in battle, to console their living fathers; and this with every idea of manly consolation, and with every generous incentive to a contempt of death, and a love of their country, that the powers of nature or of art could suggest. It is here this oration concludes, being (as we have shewn) a 9 See before, p. 423. r See Dr. Bentham's elegant edition of this oration, in his Aóyoı 'Emirapío, printed at Oxford, 1746, from p. 21 to p. 40. See the same edition, from the words Ὦ παῖδες, ὅτι μέν ἐστε πατέρων ἀγαθῶν, p. 41, to the conclusion of the oration, p. 48. perfect whole, executed with all the strength of a sublime language, under the management of a great and sublime genius. If these speculations appear too dry, they may be rendered more pleasing, if the reader would peruse the two pieces criticised. His labour, he might be assured, would not be lost, as he would peruse two of the finest pieces, which the two finest ages of antiquity produced. We cannot however quit this theory concerning whole and parts, without observing, that it regards alike both small works and great; and that it descends even to an essay, to a sonnet, to an ode. These minuter efforts of genius, unless, they possess (if I may be pardoned the expression) a certain character of totality, lose a capital pleasure derived from their union; from a union which, collected in a few pertinent ideas, combines them all happily, under one amicable form. Without this union, the production is no better than a sort of vague effusion, where sentences follow sentences, and stanzas follow stanzas, with no apparent reason why they should be two rather than twenty, or twenty rather than two. If we want another argument for this minuter totality, we may refer to nature, which art is said to imitate. Not only this universe is one stupendous whole, but such also is a tree, a shrub, a flower; such those beings which, without the aid of glasses, even escape our perception. And so much for totality, (I venture to familiarize the term,) that common and essential character to every legitimate composition. There is another character left, which, though foreign to the present purpose, I venture to mention, and that is the character of accuracy. Every work ought to be as accurate as possible. And yet, though this apply to works of every kind, there is a difference whether the work be great or small. In greater works, (such as histories, epic poems, and the like,) their very magnitude excuses incidental defects, and their authors, according to Horace, may be allowed to slumber. It is otherwise in smaller works, for the very reason that they are smaller. Such, through every part, both in sentiment and diction, should be perspicuous, pure, simple, and precise. As examples often illustrate better than theory, the following short piece is subjoined for perusal. The reader may be assured, it comes not from the author; and yet, though not his own, he cannot help feeling a paternal solicitude for it; a wish for indulgence to a juvenile genius, that never meant a private essay for public inspection. "Several ladies in the country having acted a dramatic pastoral, in which one of them, under the name of Florizel, a shep herd, makes love to another, under the name of Perdita, a shepherdess; their acting being finished, and they returned to their proper characters, one of them addresses the other in the following lines: "No more shall we with trembling hear that bell,* The curtain drops, and now we both remain, The author, in his own works, as far as his genius would assist, has endeavoured to give them a just totality. He has endeavoured that each of them should exhibit a real beginning, middle, and end, and these properly adapted to the places which they possess, and incapable of transposition, without detriment or confusion. He does not, however, venture upon a detail, because he does not think it worthy to follow the detail of productions, like the Georgics or the Menexenus. So much, therefore, for the speculation concerning whole and parts, and such matters relative to it, as have incidentally arisen. We are now to say something upon the theory of sentiment; and as sentiment and manners are intimately connected, and in a drama both of them naturally rise out of the fable, it seems also proper to say something upon dramatic speculation in general, beginning, according to order, first from the first. CHAPTER VI. DRAMATIC SPECULATIONS THE CONSTITUTIVE PARTS OF EVERY DRAMA -SIX IN NUMBER-WHICH OF THESE BELONG TO OTHER ARTISTSWHICH TO THE POET-TRANSITION TO THOSE WHICH APPERTAIN TO THE POET. THE laws and principles of dramatic poetry among the Greeks, whether it was from the excellence of their pieces, or of their language, or of both, were treated with attention even by their ablest philosophers. We shall endeavour to give a sketch of their ideas; and, if it shall appear that we illustrate by instances chiefly modern, we have so done, because we believe that it demonstrates the universality of the precepts. 'The play-bell. |