that high morality which consecrates principles without regard to consequences. It may sink down to a mere social coincidence with certain opinions or prejudices, to a mere instrument of vanity, but even when so disfigured we may still recognize in it the shadow of a sublime idea. I know no apter symbol of the manner in which the tender sensibility of honour is portrayed by Calderon, than the fabulous story of the ermine, which sets such high value on the whiteness of its skin, that rather than stain it, on being pursued by the hunters, it yields itself up to destruction. This feeling for honour is equally powerful in the female characters; it rules over love, which is only allowed a place beside it, but not above it. The honour of the women consists, according to the manner of thinking of the dramas of Calderon, in loving only one man of pure and unspotted honour, and loving him with perfect purity, in entertaining no sort of ambiguous devotion, which approaches within too great nearness of the most severe female dignity. Love requires inviolable secrecy till a lawful union permits it to be publicly declared. This secrecy secures it from the poisonous intermixture of vanity, which would boast of pretensions or conceded favours; it gives it the appearance of a vow, which from its mystery is the more sacredly observed. In this morality, it is true, cunning and dissimulation are allowed for the sake of love, and in so far honour may be said to be infringed on; but the most delicate regards are notwithstanding observed in the collision with other duties; with those of friendship for example. The power of jealousy, always alive and often breaking out in a dreadful manner, not like that of eastern countries, a jealousy of possession, but of the slightest emotions of the heart and its most imperceptible demonstrations, serves to ennoble love, as this feeling when it is not altogether exclusive sinks beneath itself. The perplexity to which the collision of all these mental motives gives rise frequently ends in nothing, and then the catastrophe is truly comic; sometimes, however, it takes a tragic turn, and then honour becomes a hostile destiny for him who cannot satisfy it without either annihilating his own felicity or becoming even a criminal.

This is the higher spirit of the dramas, which by foreigners are called pieces of intrigue; in Spanish, they are called from the dress in which they are acted, comedies of cloak and sword (Comedias de capa y espada). They have commonly no other burlesque part than the character of a merry servant, known by the name of the Gracioso. This servant chiefly serves to parody the ideal motives from which his master acts, and this he frequently does in the most elegant and witty manner. He is seldom used as an efficient lever to establish by his artifices the in

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trigue, in which we rather admire the wit of accident than of contrivance. Other pieces are called Comedias de figuron; the remaining figures are usually the same with those in the former class, only there is always one drawn in caricature which occupies a prominent place in the composition. We cannot refuse the name of pieces of character to many of the dramas of Calderon, although we must not expect the most delicate characterization from the poets of a nation in which the violence of passion and an exalted fancy neither leave sufficient leisure nor sufficient coldness of blood for the designs of prying observation.

Another class of his pieces is called by Calderon himself, festal dramas (fiestas). They were destined for representation at court on solemn occasions; and though they require the theatrical pomp of frequent change of decoration and visible wonders, and though music is also often introduced into them, still we may call them poetical operas, that is, dramas which, by the mere splendour of poetry, perform what in the opera can only be attained by the machinery, the music, and the dancing. Here the poet gives himself wholly up to the boldest flight of his fancy, and his creation hardly touches the earth.

His mind, however, is most distinctly expressed in the religious subjects which he handled. He paints love with general features merely, he speaks her technical poetical language. Religion is his peculiar love, the heart of his heart. For religion alone he excites the most overpowering emotions, which penetrate into the inmost recesses of the soul. It would rather appear that he did not wish to enter with the same fervour into worldly events. However turbid they may be in themselves, from the religious medium through which he views them, they appear to him perfectly bright. This fortunate man escaped from the wild labyrinths of doubt into the citadel of belief, from whence he viewed and portrayed the storms of the world with undisturbed tranquillity of soul; human life was to him no longer a dark riddle. Even his tears reflect the image of heaven, like dewdrops on a flower in the sun. may apparently be, is an incessant hymn of joy on the majesty of His poetry, whatever its object the creation: he celebrates the productions of nature and human art with an astonishment always joyful and always new, as if he saw them for the first time in an unworn festal splendour. It is the first waking of Adam, coupled with an eloquence and skill of expression, with a thorough acquaintance with the most mysterious relations of nature, such as high mental cultivation and mature contemplation can alone give. When he compares the most remote, the greatest and the smallest, stars and flowers, the sense of all his metaphors is the mutual attraction of created

things to one another on account of their common origin, and this delightful harmony and unity of the world is again with him merely a refulgence of the eternal love which embraces the uni

verse.

Calderon still flourished at a time when a strong inclination began to manifest itself in the other countries of Europe, to that mannerism of taste in the arts, and those prosaic views in literature, which in the eighteenth century obtained such universal dominion. He is consequently to be considered as the last summit of the romantic poetry. All its magnificence is lavished in his works, as in fireworks, the most gaudy colours, the mostdazzling cascades and circles, are usually reserved for the last explosion.

The Spanish theatre continued to be cultivated in the same sense, for nearly a generation after Calderon. All, however, which was produced in that time may be considered as a mere echo of the preceding productions, and nothing new and truly peculiar appeared, which deserves to be named after Calderon. A great barrenness is afterwards perceptible. Single attempts have been made to produce regular tragedies, that is to say, after the French cut. Even the declamatory drama of Diderot has found its imitators. I recollect having read a Spanish play, the object of which was to recommend the abolition of the torture. The exhilaration to be expected from such a work may be easily conceived. Those Spaniards who are runaways from their old national taste extol highly the prosaical and moral dramas of Moratin; but we see no reason for seeking in Spain what we have as good, or, more correctly speaking, equally bad at home. The majority of the spectators have preserved themselves tolerably exempt from these foreign influences; when a bel esprit undertook a number of years ago to reduce a justly admired piece of Moreto (El parecido en la corte) to a conformity with the three unities, the pit at Madrid were thrown into such a commotion that the players could only appease them by announcing the piece for the next day in its genuine shape.

When external circumstances, for instance, the influence of the clergy, the oppression of the censure, and even the jealous vigilance of the people for the preservation of their old manners, oppose in any country the introduction of what passes in neigh bouring states for a progress in mental cultivation, it frequently happens that the better description of heads will entertain an undue longing for the forbidden fruit, and that they first begin to admire some depravity in art, when it has elsewhere ceased to be fashionable. Certain mental maladies are so epidemical in an age, that a nation never can be secure from infection till it has

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LECTURES ON DRAMATIC LITERature.

once been inoculated. However, the Spaniards it would appear, with respect to the passive illumination of the last generation, have come off with the chicken pox, while the disfiguring variolous scars are but too visible in the features of other nations. Living nearly in an insular situation, they have slept the eighteenth century, and how could they in the main have applied their time better? Should the Spanish poetry again awake in old Europe, or in the other hemisphere, it would certainly have a step to make, from instinct to consciousness. What the Spaniards have hitherto loved from native inclination, they must learn to reverence on clear principles, and, unconcerned at the criticism which has in the interval sprung up, proceed to fresh creations in the spirit of their great poets.

LECTURE XV.

Origin of the German theatre.-Hans Sachs.-Gryphius.-The age of Gottsched.-Wretched imitation of the French.-Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller. -Review of their works.-Their influence on chivalrous dramas, affecting dramas, and family pictures.-Prospects for futurity.

In its cultivated state, the German theatre is much younger than any of those of which we have already spoken, and we are not therefore to wonder, if the store of our literature in valuable original works, in this department, is also much more scanty.

Little more than half a century ago, the German literature was at the very lowest ebb in point of talent, and since that time when greater exertions first began to be made, the Germans have proceeded with gigantic strides. If the dramatic art has not been cultivated with the same success, and I may add with the same zeal, as other departments, the cause must rather perhaps be attributed to a number of unfavourable circumstances than to any want of talents.

The rude beginnings of the stage with us are as old as in other countries. The oldest drama which we have in writing is the production of one Hans Rosenpluet, a native of Nuremberg, about the middle of the fifteenth century. He was followed by two fruitful writers born in the same imperial city, Hans Sachs and Ayrer. In the works of Hans Sachs we find a great multitude of tragedies, comedies, spiritual and temporal histories, where the prologue and epilogue are always spoken by the herald, besides merry carnival plays. The above, it appears, were all acted, not by players, but by respectable citizens, as an allowable relaxation for the mind, without any theatrical apparatus. The carnival plays are somewhat coarse, but not unfrequently extremely droll, as the jokes in general are; they often run into the wildest farce, and, inspired by mirth and drollery, leave the bounds of 'the world of reality behind them. The composition in all these plays is respectable, and does not contain many circumlocutions: all the characters, from God the Father downwards, state at once in clear terms what they have at heart, and the reasons for which

The first mention of the mysteries or spiritual representations in Germany, with which I am acquainted, is to be found in the Eulen-spiegel. We may see this merry, but somewhat disgusting trick, of the celebrated buffoon, in the 13th History; "How Eulen-spiegel made a play in the Easter fair, in which the priest and his maid-servant fought with the boors." Eulen-spiegel is stated to have lived towards the middle of the fourteenth century, but the book cannot be placed farther back than the beginning of the fifteenth.