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as Spencer's Fairy Queen was the admired work of the times.

Allegorical beings, performing acts of chivalry, fell in with the taste of an age that affected abftrufe Learning, romantic Valour, and high-flown Gallantry, Prince Arthur, the British Hercules, was brought from ancient ballads and romances, to be allegorized into the knight of magnanimity, at the court of Gloriana. His knights followed him thither, in the fame moralized garb and even the queftynge beaft received no less honour and improvement from the allegorizing art of Spencer, as has been fhewn by a Critic of great learning, ingenuity, and tafte, in his obfervations on the Fairy Queen.

Our first theatrical entertainments, after we emerged from grofs barbarifm, were of the allegorical kind. The Christmas carol, and carnival fhews, the pious paftimes of our holy-days, were turned into pageantries K 3

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and mafques, all fymbolical and allegorical. -Our stage rose from hymns to the Virgin, and encomiums on the Patriarchs and Saints: as the Grecian tragedies from the hymns to Bacchus. Our early poets added narration and action to this kind of pfalmody, as Æfchylus had done to the song of the goat. Much more rapid indeed was the progress of the Grecian stage towards perfection.Philofophy, Poetry, Eloquence, all the fine arts, were in their meridian glory, when the drama firft began to dawn at Athens, and gloriously it shone forth, illumined by every kind of intellectual light.

Shakespear, in the dark shades of Gothic barbarism, had no refources but in the very phantoms, that walked the night of ignorance and fuperftition or in touching the latent paffions of civil rage and difcord: fure to please best his fierce and barbarous audience, when he raised the bloody ghost, or reared the warlike standard, His choice of these fubjects was judicious, if we confider the

times in which he lived; his management of them fo masterly, that he will be admired in all times.

In the fame age, Ben. Johnson, more proud of his learning than confident of his genius, was defirous to give a metaphyfical air to his works. He compofed many pieces, of the allegorical kind, established on the Grecian mythology, and rendered his playhouse a perfect pantheon. Shakespear difdained thefe quaint devices; an admirable judge of human nature, with a capacity most extenfive, and an invention. most happy, he contented himself with giving dramatic manners to Hiftory, Sublimity: and its appropriated powers and charms to Fiction; and in both these arts he is unequalled.The Cataline and Sejanus of Johnson are cold, crude, heavy pieces; turgid where they should be great; bombaft where they should be fublime; the fentiments. extravagant; the manners exaggerated; and the whole undramatically conducted by long fenatorial fpeeches, and flat plagiarisms from K 4 Tacitu

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Tacitus and Salluft. Such of this author's pieces as he boasts to be grounded on antitiquity and folid learning, and to lay hold on removed mysteries *, have neither the majesty of Shakespear's serious fables, nor the pleafing fportfulness and poetical imagination of his fairy tales. Indeed if we compare our countryman in this refpect, with the most admired writers of Antiquity, we fhall, perhaps, not find him inferior to them.. Afchylus, with greater impetuofity of genius than even Shakespear, makes bold incurfions into the blind chaos of mingled allegory and fable, but he is not so happy in diffusing the folemn fhade; in cafting the dim, religious light that should reign there. When he introduces his furies, and other fuperna tural beings, he exposes them by too glaring a light; caufes affright in the fpectator, but never rises to the imparting that unlimited terror which we feel when Macbeth to his bold addrefs,

* Prologue to the Masque of Queens.

How

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How now! ye fecret, foul, and midnight hags,

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A deed without a name.

The witches of the foreft are as important in the tragedy of Macbeth, as the Eumenides in the drama of Æfchylus; but our Poet is infinitely more dexterous and judicious in the conduct of their part. The fecret, foul, and midnight hags are not introduced into the caftle of Macbeth; they never appear but in their allotted region of folitude and night, nor act beyond their sphere of ambiguous prophecy, and malignant forcery. The Eumenides, fnoring in the temple of Apollo, and then appearing as evidences against Oreftes in the Areopagus, seem both acting out of their sphere, and below their character. It was the appointed office of the venerable goddeffes, to avenge the crimes unwhipt of juftice, not to demand the public trial of guilty men. They must lose much of the fear and reverence in which they were held

for

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