est us in a tale of pure and romantic love, he should take a harlot for his heroine. In allying things hideous with things beauteous, things vicious with things virtuous, instead of ennobling ugliness by the beauty, vice by the virtue, you connect with it, you too frequently make that ridiculous and ignoble which should be kept sacred, venerated, and religious. "Affix God to the gibbet," says M. Victor Hugo," and you have the cross." We know that punishment does not constitute crime, that God does not cease to be God for his crucifixion but, to prove the value of M. Victor Hugo's theory, it would be necessary to show -not that Christ remained Christ after he was crucified-but that he actually became Christ by the very act of his crucifixion. : Nothing can be so absurd as to attempt to arrive at a particular effect in opposition to the natural sympathies that produce it. It is very true that a young man may be attached to an ugly old woman: we have all known instances of this. Yet, if Romeo had killed himself for Juliet's aunt, or Juliet's duenna, or Juliet's grandmother, it is very doubtful whether the audience would not have been quite as much inclined to laugh at him for a consummate fool, as to weep for him as a romantic lover. It is the grace, the beauty, the tender years of Juliet-it is this which makes us feel all the passion, and comprehend all the despair, of the Italian youth. The wonderful art of Shakspeare is, that, without distorting a character into a caricature, he always takes care that it produces in us a right effect. We view Richard III. with horror, and yet he is a great captain -a wise and provident monarch-valiant intelligent. The deformities of the usurper are not exaggerated, his merits are allowed; but still, in spite of the admiration we feel for his gallantry as a soldier, for his sagacity as a prince, we despise him as a hypocrite, and hate him as an assassin. M. V. Hugo would have made us love him in spite of his hump, in spite of his murders, in spite of his dissembling, in spite of all these defects and a hundred others, if he had them; nay, on account of these very defects themselves, he would have selected him just as the person that we should love, that we must loveand this for some peculiar virtue, the very last we should have suspected him of. If M. V. Hugo were to wish to inspire you with terror, reader, he would try to frighten you with a sheep; if he were to wish to give you an idea of swiftness, he would prefer doing it by a tortoise. 'Lucrèce Borgia' met with very deserved success; but this was in spite of the principle it was written upon, and not on account of it: it was on account of the vivid colouring, the passionate energy, the quick succession of action, the force and the magnificence of two or three dramatic situations, and in spite of the sentimental whining of an Italian mercenary after an unknown mother who had abandoned him, and the ridiculous and puling affection of such a woman as Lucrèce Borgia for her incestuous offspring, that this piece succeeded. I remember a story, told in some learned nursery-book, of a contest between the archers of King Richard and those of Robin Hood. The archers of King Richard, rather too confident perhaps in their skill, preferred showing it by shooting at the moon, while the shrewder archers of Robin Hood shot at the target. It is hardly necessary to say, that the archers of Robin Hood carried off all the prizes. This is just the difference between M. Victor Hugo and M. Dumas. The one aims at attainable, the other at unattainable objects: the one looks to the success he is to obtain, the other at the theory through which he is determined to obtain it. For strength and poesy of language, for force and magnificence of conception, there can be no comparison between M. V. Hugo and M. Dumas. The first has nobler and loftier elements for the composition of a dramatic poet, the second produces a more perfect effect from inferior materials. M. V. Hugo never steps out of the sublime without falling at once into the absurd: however triumphant the piece you are listening to may be in a particular passage, you never feel sure that it will succeed as a whole-some word, some phrase surprises and shocks you when you least expect it. From the moment that the curtain is raised, until the moment it falls, the author is in a perpetual struggle with his audience: now you are inclined to smile, and he suddenly forces you to admire, now you are inclined to admire, and again you are involuntarily compelled to laugh. In nothing is M.V. Hugo consistent careless. of applause, as you would suppose, and might really believe, from the plan he pursues—at times he testifies the most vulgar desire for a cheerand a lady declares to the pit at the Porte St. Martin, that there is something finer than being the Countess of Shrewsbury, viz.: being the wife of a cutler's apprentice!! Recondite in his research after costume and scenery, this writer despises and confounds, in the most painful manner, historical facts. In 'Marie Tudor,'* Mary of England, whose chas * It is very difficult to make the plan of 'Marie Tudor' intelligible, more especially since the author has not succeeded in doing so. Marie Tudor, just before her marriage with Philip, has for paramour an Italian adventurer, Fabiani, This Italian adventurer seduces a young woman betrothed to a cutler's apprentice, who appears to be in the lowest state of life, but who is in reality a Talbot, a Countess of Shrewsbury, and Lord knows what besides. The queen, discovering this intrigue, is determined to be avenged, and, in order to be so, she asks the apprentice, as the reward for her recognizing the rights of the new Countess of Shrewsbury, to pretend to stab her, (the queen,) and accuse Fabiani of having bribed him to do it, in which case he and Fabiani will both be disposed of by the executioner. Gilbert, the apprentice, consents in a most natural manner to this, and he and the Italian are accordingly condemned to death with the most pompous display of ignorance as to all the laws and customs of Great Britain. Two great changes at this time take place in the two ladies' feelings: Marie is all agony to save Fabiani, whom she has taken such pains to have beheaded; and the Countess of Shrewsbury discovers that she never liked Fabiani, who had seduced her, but the apprentice, whom she had always before regretted she could not like. The interest of the play now turns on one of the prisoners having escaped-and each lady believing that it is her lover; and there |