conflagrations, massacre of troops, and Death sitting triumphantly under a Republican banner, upon the Crown, the Sceptre, and the Bible. Such things are, and too numerous to mention. They have their object. They are unnoticed have free scope; and the minds of your Majesty's subjects are poisoned, and, of the weak, prepared for violent revolution, as the fiat of destiny. The loyal, who would dare support the monarchy with life and property, fear the establishment of Republicanism. And, it must be confessed, there are many admirers of the old limited Monarchy, with its wholesome power and restraint, who begin to doubt if an imperfect and mutilated one may not advantageously yield to another form. They never entertained these doubts before. That they should now be entertained, and with fair publicity, is an evil symptom.

But now all things go wrongprinciples seem at fault. The public mind, raw with vexation, and constant irritation-is allowed no rest; and class is made to war against class. Perpetual tempestuous agitation has driven peace from the land; every thing seems insecure. We dread a dismembered empire, a ruined, or, at best, a degraded Church, a despised and falling monarchy, and the despotism of mobs.

I am satisfied of your Majesty's kind and fatherly intentions towards your people, but you have unfortunate wretched advisers. Much mischief has been done that cannot be undone; but still there are lengths to which, in good conscience, your Majesty cannot go. If exhorted to sacrifice any the smallest interest of the Established Church, or in any part of your dominions encourage Popery, may not your Majesty protest, (and your Christian subjects will hail it with joy,) that you have sworn "to the utmost of your power to maintain the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel, and the Protestant Reformed Religion established by the law; and to preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of this realm, and to the churches committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges as by law do or shall appertain unto them or any of them?"

* Feb. 9, 1833.

Under a system of agitation raised by the Ministry, your Majesty's best and greatest subjects have been assaulted; their houses barricaded against the fury of mobs; castles and mansions of your nobility have been attacked and burnt; and the second city of the British Empire in part sacked, and in dreadful conflagration. All this, too, in the name of your Majesty and Reform. This must be charged upon your Minis

ters.

Your Christian people fear that the same Ministry, with their intended Church Reform, will actually effect the Church's downfall. The wisest and the greatest persons in your dominions, have declared in both Houses of Parliament, that the Monarchy itself is in extreme peril. The first outcry, during the sitting of this Reformed Parliament, may demand the Church. Does your Majesty think that the infernal Cerberus, with his many sleepless heads, will be satisfied with one sop? The truly loyal fear that the sacrifice of your crown will be ultimately demanded. It is already demanded. Perhaps the daily published seditions do not reach your Majesty. The Papers, the Pamphlets, the Almanacs, the Prophetic Messengers, where may be seen coloured,

Ir is a curious circumstance, that the dramatic literature of Italy should be absolutely the poorest in Europe, we mean not in the number, but in the quality of its productions. In numbers, indeed, we question whether any country in Europe can compare with it. Riccobini has appended to his History of the Italian Theatre, a list of about 5000 dramas, printed from 1500 to 1736, and Apostolo Zeno had himself collected a Dramatic Library of 4000 Italian Plays, which are now, strangely enough, in the hands of the Dominicans at Venice. But of the authors of these how many are known to the world? How many even to the Italians themselves? Ten names, perhaps, out of as many hundreds. The drama of Italy, of the very land which one would at first be disposed to select as the peculiar seat and "procreant cradle" of the dramatic art, is of all others the coldest, dullest, and most contemptible.

Look at the Italian in real life, with what vehemence he seems to feel, with what energy he expresses himself, as if trying by how many senses at once he can give vent to his emotions! Observe the morra players in the streets of Rome, glaring on each other as fiercely as if they had set their lives upon a cast, when the sole question is, whether they are to thrust out two fingers or three. See the Lazzaroni listening, as if spellbound, to the narrative of the itinerant story-teller, in the streets of Naples; the women of Malamocco and Palestrina, sitting on the sea-shore, and hailing their returning husbands and lovers with songs, as twilight darkens over the Adriatic. Look at that group of peasants from Albano, listening with the rapt soul sitting in the eyes to some strain from the sweet south, breathed before the roadside altar; or yonder procession of banditti just caught, and moving up with their gay embroidered sashes, ear-rings, and rosaries, to their prison in St Angelo-carrying the wild scenes of the middle ages, as it were, into the midst of the civilisation of

the nineteenth century. Then, add to this the recollections of antique grandeur, by which they are incessantly surrounded; the more modern remembrances of glory and crime; the infinite contrast of manners, habits, and feelings, produced by the separation of Italy into so many different states; the distinct division of ranks, which from the earliest moment has pervaded society in Italy; a language musical as is Apollo's lute, and a power of expression and action suited to the warmth and vivacity of the emotions it has to express; and how shall we account for the barrenness and coldness of the Italian drama? Where life itself seems acting, how comes the representation of that life to be so wan, so woebegone, so spiritless? Down to the time of Alfieri, their tragedies are flat and dreary as their own Campagna, of which the only ornament is here and there some mouldering fragment of antiquity. Not a trace of modern feelings, manners, or passions, do they present; over the minds of their authors, the Middle Ages, with their new creeds, religious, moral, or philosophical, seem to have passed in vain; so that, in reading the classic dramas of Trissino, Ruccellai, or Sperone Speroni, one might almost believe he was perusing some newly discovered tragedies of Seneca, excavated from Pompeii or Herculaneum. Nothing but the difference of language makes us aware that they are the production of the 16th century. Their comedies, lifeless imitations of Plautus and Terence, no more reflect the manners or feelings of the time, than the annual Latin play does the sayings and doings of the Etonians. If the heap of rubbish which Apostolo Zeno bequeathed to the monks, were to be subjected, like Don Quixote's library, to a purification by fire, we really think the only work we should interfere to preserve would be the Mandragola of the accomplished politician, historian, novelist, and dramatistMacchiavelli.

Things had come to the very worst about the middle of the 18th century. Poor Apostolo Zeno had by this time gone to swell with his ten octavos the heap he had bequeathed to his monkish executors; he had been gathered to his fathers, and the Abate Pietro Chiari reigned in his stead. The Abate was court poet at Modena, and being of opinion that the trade of a court poet was versemaking, he set to work conscientiously to do as much for his salary as it was in the power of any hardworking verseman to perform. Being well read in mythological matters, and having on the whole a turn for rhyme, he continued to pour out, or rather to hammer out, one tragedy and comedy after another, all utterly destitute of a single spark of genius or poetic fire, but regular as a regiment in line, moral to the last degree, and stately as a Lord Mayor's procession. His favourite verse was the Alexandrine; he apprehended, and with some justice, that any other would break down under the weight of his diction. It was the style of Marino and the Seccentesti applied to the most trivial and vulgar, as well as the most important or touching concerns of the stage, and embodied in versification the most unmusical and monotonous. Yet, notwithstanding all this, the Abate, from the mere absence of competition, maintained for several years the undisputed possession of the Italian stage.

It was scarcely wonderful then, that, at such a moment, the appearance of Goldoni, though certainly no star of the first magnitude, should have been hailed with an admiration bordering on enthusiasm. Looking back at the present moment to his plays-in which we perceive little except a series of agreeable conversation pieces, and early pictures of national manners, with a pervading gaiety, rather than humour or wit, which runs through them; but with an utter absence of any thing like elevation or depth of feeling; plots which, where they rise above the commonplace incidents of the day, run into all the complexities of the Spanish theatre; and incidents and language often the most trivial or vulgar,-one who has not paid a little attention to what had preceded

him, almost feels at a loss to account for that extreme popularity which conferred on the author the title of Il gran Goldoni. But the truth was, the public were so tired of the artificial and affected, that nature in any shape, however prosaic, was felt to be à relief, and Goldoni undeniably possessed the art of seizing and depicting national manners with singular truth, and liveliness of imitation. While, accordingly, his more sentimental attempts are now entirely and deservedly forgotten, his sketches of Italian character in such pieces as Le Baruffe Chiozzotte, (The Squabbles of Chiozza,) still excite, on the Italian stage, nearly the same lively interest as that with which they were originally greeted.

Still this was far enough from very elevated or distinguished aim, and amusing as Goldoni's comedies at first appeared to those accustomed to the emphatic nothingness of the Abate Chiari, the want of a higher object, and of more poetical elements in the drama, began by degrees to make itself felt. Had Goldoni been very attentive to the signs of the times, he might have perceived the growth of this feeling; but confident in his own inexhaustible fertility, and in the success of the last fifteen years, the blow which overturned for ever his literary supremacy, came upon him almost as suddenly as a thunderclap in a sunny sky.

Had a stranger about this time been present at any of the sittings of the Academia de Granelleschi at Venice, his attention would soon have been arrested by the appearance of one of its members. From his meagre figure, his melancholy features, and a certain care-worn look which he wore, he would have set him down for some plodding antiquarian, whose body, adapting itself to the constitution of his mind, seemed to be fast approaching the condition of a mummy. He would have anticipated from him some adust essay on a Roman patera, or the genuineness of a copper Otho. What would have been his astonishment, to find that the very spirit of Momus himself lurked beneath this sepulchral exterior, and instead of being wearied with an antiquarian dissertation, to listen with tears (of laughter) in his eyes, to the "Tartana degli Influssi per l'Anno 1757,”