decent and dull; lead to a smooth and unerring mediocrity, secure only of not giving offence, and at the same time subdue all that has most power to yield delight. Be this as it may in poetry, it is certain that, in the conduct of life, a studious and exclusive attention to refinement, with its small delicacies and critical punctilios, invariably tends to reduce substance and vigour, to cripple all freedom of action, and stifle all warmth and alacrity of feeling. As perities are removed-coarseness is softened down; but with the same kind of consequences as attend the labours of certain renovators of old pictures, who, offended by here and there a speck of dirt, set themselves to scrubbing and scraping with such resolution, that dirt, and colour, and form, yield before them, and a picture finally comes forth from their hands, smooth and clean-and nothing else.

Man, to shelter himself from the cold, put on clothing; and, without stopping to inquire at present how much he may have lost by this measure in power and freedom of bodily action, as he gained something in point of comfort and enjoyment, we will admit that he did well. Having thus satisfied a plain necessity, he begins, under new influences of laziness and leisure, to improve and refine; makes a sort of plaything of his dress; converts it, without the least regard to its original purposes, into a simple subject of experimental decoration; pursues a continual round of unmeaning changes, only because they are changes, not adapting his finery to his body, but forcing his body to be the servant of his finery, turning it into a mere clothes-peg, ―a convenient kind of thing made to show off the beauty of red cloth and shining satin. We admire all this, it is true; though it would be difficult to justify ourselves for so doing to good taste-if taste has any connection with plain sense and common propriety. In the matter of dress, taste would certainly admit nothing tending to disguise the "fair proportions" of the body, or to obstruct the ease, and grace, and dignity, of its natural movements. We admire fine clothes wherever we see them; but purely on their own account. We look with delight on a

procession of the nobility in their state dresses-a mere doating on rich stuffs and gaudy colours-an idle adoration of irrelevant velvet and impertinent feathers. We should admire them in the same spirit were they hung with variegated lamps; or could come to the grace, I have no doubt, with a little discipline, of regarding with a pleasing wonder Knights Grand Crosses, and Commanders, rolling and ducking along in the guise of "Jack in the Green.” I have heard of a tribe of people in America, or somewhere, who, being rather ill-provided with the ordinary manufactures that supply the magnificence of dress, help out their poverty by borrowing from the more costly and portable part of their household furniture. Among them you shall see a dignitary, on state occasions, covered, under pretence of shirt and coat, with a miscellaneous load of crockery and hardwareglittering and jingling in a musical attire of tea-pots, spoons, warmingpan, and fire-irons. Very pretty all this, I am ready to grant, in a bare view of ornament. I am maintaining only, that such adventurous niceties are apt to do violence to qualities of far more importance than ornament. We sneer at the naked savage, besmeared with tallow and ochre; and his embellishments are certainly coarse enough, ill-applied, and none of the sweetest: but be it remembered that, simple and greasy as he stands, he can run down a fox at a moment's notice, or swim a river, or scale a precipice; while a Knight Grand Cross, in the full glory of his wardrobe, shall scarcely perchance be able to walk without help.-After all, simplicity is the prime element of all that is truly great and lastingly pleasing. Whatever the proprietors of silk breeches and cocked hats may think of the matter, the naked figure exhibits man in his most striking form of beauty and power. I am not contending that every man out of his clothes is an Apollo: it is enough for my argument if it be admitted, that Apollo in a coat and breeches would at once lose all his dignity and grace.

A scheme of torture, analogous to that applied to dress, is extended by "the first circles" to all their concernments. Their passions and af

fections, their loves and friendships, are so encumbered with dull rites and irrelevant forms, that they can scarcely live under the load. They accumulate drapery and figure-work, till substance is quite buried under show, and nothing remains but hollow signs and heartless appearances; till dropping a card at his door is a visit to an acquaintance, and sending an empty coach to his funeral is mourning for a friend. Etiquette is the sovereign controller of conduct, -the sole representative of nature, among certain classes. They cast out the unruly souls that were born with them, banish rebellious reason and pragmatical conscience, and fill themselves with an entirely new order of machinery, quiet, precise, passive and as true to the Court Calendar as the needle to the pole. The vulgar, or the mass of mankind, have heads and hearts, and will be thrusting themselves forward into all the serious duties and illustrious cares of life; so that nothing connected with the highest aims of reason and invention, or with the noblest or the kindest affections, is left untouched by their vile participation. How then are" the great" to distinguish themselves? What sacred peculiarities can they assume, except certain small modes, superadded to the ordinary ways of doing ordinary things, which the multitude are too full of business and enjoyment to notice or imitate? Shut out from the animating bustle of common life-its anxious wants and earnest interests, they have no resource against time, and no provision for glory, except that of investing little things with great names; dignifying trifles by magnificent devices, and helping out their shortness and insipidity with circuitous ceremony and intricate parade. Think of the popular process of despatching a pound or two of food into the stomach, to relieve hunger and emptiness, and then turn your attention to the multiplied entanglements--the plot and stratagem, of a grand dinner-party in high life. You and I "jump into" our clothes-" just swallow a mouth, ful,"-"toss off" a draught-put on our hats and " are off,"-and still find enough to do before we take another jump-into bed: but such brevities of conduct would absolutely

annihilate the great for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. We talk of the twinkling of an eye-and half a minute-divisions of time which a man of quality has no conception of. His business is delay; his enjoyment, not to be lively in every thing, but to be long.

The worst effect of these forms and superfluities is, that they break down the energies of the mind, and thoroughly incapacitate a man from acting, in any circumstances, with directness and promptitude. They are not to be cast aside, as an artisan puts off his Sunday clothes, when they might distract his attention and obstruct his labour. Once become endeared and habitual, they cling to a man for ever. Though adapted only to the service of a morning levee or an evening ball, he will be faithful to them under every aspect of fortune. If called upon for dispatch by any untried emergency, however critical and perilous, he is called in vain: he must still refer to his little system of regulated movements, and prescribed delays; he has no notion of sudden impulses, and sudden action; he must have his appointed signals, and due permits; and, though death should stare him in the face, will provide for his safety only according to law. He loves forms for their own sake: they have been capable, he has found, of giving interest to the smallest occasions, and the greatest occasions cannot induce him to dispense with them. The fatal capture of Louis XVI. at Varennes, was caused, Madame de Staël declares," by some delays of form and ceremony, without which it was impossible for the King to get into his coach." As for bundling him in at once, and scampering off with him for his life, as though he had been nothing but a man in his senses, it was not to be thought of. True, the danger was pressing and nothing less than death-but the Gold Stick! and the Silver Stick! and all the other sticks, bearing or borne, would you think of neglecting them for a moment, or in any moment?

Cardinal de Retz gives us an account of a charming little interlude of court politics happening in his time, which is strikingly illustrative of the absorbing influence of forms, and the kind of serious and impas

sioned frivolity that they fix in the mind-a frivolity not to be daunted by the threats and frowns of the most momentous occasions. At a period when the nation was in arms for its best and dearest rights, and the monarchy trembled to its base, the Prince of Condè interceded, with his high authority, to have a stool at court granted to the Countess of Foix, a privilege hitherto enjoyed only by duchesses. Mazarin opposes the measure with his whole soul, and incites all the young noblemen at court to resist, with their lives, all orders of stools that were not granted upon special warrant. The Prince seeing this formidable array, headed by the Mareschal de L'Hôpital, thought it prudent to recede; though still not without trying some means of gratifying the pride and jealousy of his friend the Countess. As he could not raise her to a stool, the next best mode of establishing an equality, he thought, would be to pull the duchesses down; and accordingly, he proposed that all stools of all privileged houses should be suppressed. The Family of Rohan was the first of the number, and would as soon have given up their lives. De Retz now took the alarm, and resolved upon a counter-assembly "for maintaining the stool of the house of Rohan." He used, at the same time, all his personal influence with the Prince of Condè, and prevailed. "I promise you," said that great man, not to oppose the privilege of the stool, in the house of Rohan." This point established, people could then proceed to consider, whether some measures might not be adopted for saving_Paris from massacre and pillage.-De Retz relates his story with the most perfect gravity, being himself not a little infected with the great epidemic of courts, the disease of frivolity and forms. Hurrying one day to mediate between the soldiers and the people, in the heat and peril of a bloody scuffle, he had one of his pages wounded, he informs us, "who held up his cassock behind." Conceive a man so attended in such a moment! Cardinals, it may be said, always have their train-bearers: and this is precisely what I have been contending for. The great must have their forms, cost what it may; fashion go

verns them like a fatality, bending to neither time nor circumstance. In their blind obedience, they remind me of a little animal I have read of, called the Lapland Marmot, whose instinct it is, when in motion, to advance invariably straight forwards. Whatever impediments may oppose it, fire or water, this instinct prevails: it can indulge in neither cir cuit nor "short cut;" if it encounters a well, it plunges into it, and is seen crawling up on the other side; if it is stopped by a hay-stack, it gnaws its way through it; if it meets a boat on the water, it passes over it-in short, it gives way to nothing, and goes round nothing, but keeps boring on in its inflexible line, "through dense and rare," though its life should be the sacrifice of its constancy.

Age and approaching death, one would imagine, might sober even a courtier; force him at last to be in earnest; to put away all solemn trifling and imposture, and prepare for his change in simplicity and truth. The case, however, is otherwise. Decrepitude, with its rigid back, may have its little tricks; and something in the way of juggle and show may be got up even on a death-bed. As long as there is breath, there may be etiquette-nay, when a man has ceremoniously ceased to exist, his cold and corrupting remains may still go through their course of mummery, under the direction of his surviving and sympathetic friends: he may "lie in state" till he is quite rotten, and then be carried to the grave in the face of day, amidst the palpable woe of a thousand coaches, all respectfully empty, a state horse, and a lid of feathers. Madame du Deffand, on her death-bed, though without an atom of religious feeling in her heart, would on no account go out of the world without the polite custom of a clergyman-making, however, an especial provision against being disturbed by any seriousness of meaning on the occasion. "Monsieur le Curè," said the dying penitent to the priest who attended her, you will be perfectly satisfied with me, as I shall be with you, if you perplex me with no reasons, questions, or sermons." Montaigne cites a very remarkable instance of death-bed foolery. Speaking of the insignificance

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of death in certain minds, he mentions a great man, who spent his last hours in arranging the honours of his own funeral. Having earnestly solicited the attendance of his friends of rank and wealth, and settled with minute exactness the whole method and order of this his final show, he seemed quite at ease, and died content. "I have seldom heard," adds Montaigne, "of so long-lived a vanity."

On such a system of refinement as this, the great, that is, the very great, found their claims to superiority over the bulk of mankind-the vulgar, the people, the rabble, or any other contemptuous collective you please, that shall designate the active, thinking, feeling crowd, whose pitiful lot it is, to fill up their time with useful industry, or natural enjoyments. He is the first in rank who is least independent of rules and ceremonies. The Court Calendar, that unanswerable distri butor of degrees, so determines, and there can be no doubt of it. A peer is greater than a baronet, a duke is greater than a peer, and a king takes precedence of all. Greater than a King!-Inconceivable! A Welsh bi shop made an apology to James I, for preferring God-to his Majesty. The question of precedence was delicate, but the Deity, it was believed, in the phrase of the court, had the pas.

Contemplating enormities like these, one is disposed almost to justify Rousseau, or any man, in abhorring the very name of civilization, and, in a paroxysm of overpowering disgust,

might exclaim," Send us to our caves again-strip us to the wind, and rain, and sun; give us our gross loves-our fierce hatred our bloody revenge ;-any thing, if it be but nature." Such a burst over, we soon take heart again, and perceive that there is no pressing necessity for adopting so tremendous a remedy. Etiquette, in its mawkish mixture of stateliness and imbecility, though the exclusive currency of the "first society," does not certainly represent human nature in an attractive dress. But civilization is not responsible for its abominations, and she can point to millions upon millions of useful, intelligent, and happy creatures of her work, to refute such a scandal.

We may remember too for our comfort, that even in the class which, by right of station, is most chargeable with the sins of vanity and affectation, there are numberless illustrious examples, with whom high rank is but subsidiary to all that can exalt and adorn human nature. The mere puppets of etiquette are, in this country at least, in a minority, evem at court. The capability of folly is pretty equally distributed among all classes: we can only say, that it is most likely to meet with dangerous encouragement among those who are farthest removed from the restraints of wholesome labour, and the sobering cares of common life. A man who has his bread to get, has no time to make himself very ridiculous.

Captain Clutterbuck. Do you mean Allan Ramsay?

I mean Allan Cunningham, who has just Author. No, nor Barbara' Allan either. published his tragedy of Sir Marmaduke Maxwell, full of merry-making and märdering, kissing and cutting of throats, and passages which lead to nothing, and which ' are very pretty passages for all that. Not

a glimpse of probability is there about the plot, but so much animation in particular passages, and such a vein of poetry through the whole, as I dearly wish I could infuse into my Culinary Remains, should I ever be tempted to publish them. With a po pular impress, people would read and admire the beauties of Allan-as it is, they may, perhaps, only note his defects-or, what is worse, not note him at all. But never mind them, honest Allan; you are a credit to Caledonia for all that.-There are some lyrical effusions of his too, which you would do well to read, Captain. "It's hame and it's hame," is equal to Burns.

We ourselves agree to this une quivocal and enviable testimony in its favour; and we are the more glad to avail ourselves of it, as (besides private reasons, which would lead us to avoid any thing that might be construed into a puff) it enables us to speak our minds more freely with respect to a few faults which strike us (like specks on the sun's disk) in this very interesting performance. We think (though we do not know that this is a fault) that the effect of this Dramatic Poem is more that which arises from the perusal of a romance than of a tragedy. The interest of the story prevails over the force of the dialogue, though the last is spirited and natural: the charac ters serve more as vehicles to convey a series of extraordinary incidents, than to display the extreme workings of the passions or the hidden springs of action. We read on, without being violently stimulated or much startled, with an unabated and per sonal anxiety about the event of the fable and the fate of the different characters-with a love of the good, and a hatred of the vicious agents in the plot as we should read the narrative of any striking occurrence in actual life, put into pleasing and fanciful verse. Perhaps Mr. Cunning ham too often lays aside the tragic buskin to assume the Minstrel's harp, or to rehearse the affecting passages of Traditional Literature. We can attribute this not more to a want of confirmed practice than to an amiable modesty. Scarce conscious of universally-acknowledged merit in his favourite pursuits, it is no wonder that he touches the strings with a trembling and uncertain hand in a new department of art. Increased experience would give greater bold ness; and greater boldness would be

crowned with more triumphant success, for our author does not want resources in feeling or nature. In case Mr. Cunningham gives us another Scottish tragedy, we would advise him (as far as he may think our opinion worth attending to) to get rid of the mixture of quaint proverbial phrases and northern dialect. A pastoral drama (like Allan Ramsay's GENTLE SHEPHERD) may be written entirely in the Scottish idiom: a tragedy, or even a dramatic poem, with stately and heroic characters in it, should (we conceive) be written entirely in English: the jumbling the two languages together is decidedly bad in either case, and is only proper to the narrative or ballad style, where the dignity of no individual is committed, and where the author is privileged (as a remote spectator of the scene) to speak either in his own person or to throw in occasional sprinklings of local and national expression, with a view to produce a more lively sense of reality and to give it a dramatic air. But where the form itself is dramatic, the same licence (to our feelings) is neither necessary nor allowable. In a romantic description of an invincible knight of old, it may be a peasant that speaks, or from whom we have learnt the story-we may avail ourselves therefore of all the bye-resources, the quaint or casual varieties of the language, to touch, to identify, to surprise. But where the knight himself speaks in his own character, his language should be one, and it should be (according to the prevailing prejudice) dignified. Otherwise, "the blank verse halts for it." Such words as shealing, and cushat, and cummer, and dool, come in very well among the rude rhymes of a ballad-strain, which (for any thing that appears to the contrary) might have been said or sung by an old Highland bagpipeplayer five hundred years ago-they assist the illusion, which is favourable to the poet, and flattering to the reader-and we can turn at leisure to the glossary to know the meaning, as an improvement of the mind and an enlargement of our knowledge. But it is not so well, when a noble and accomplished person is speaking in good set lines of ten syllables, to have to stop him repeatedly with "What ́