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to Philofophy, he hopes the may establish with the learned the worship, she won from the ignorant; fo he makes her quit the old traditional fable, whence she derived her first authority and power, to follow airy hypothefis, and chimerical systems. Allegory, the daughter of fable, is admired by the faftidious Wit, and abstruse Scholar, when her mother begins to be treated as fuperannuated, foolish, and doting; but however well she may please and amufe, not being worshipped as divine, she does not awe and terrify like sacred mythology, nor ever can establish the fame fearful devotion, nor assume such arbitrary power over the mind. Her perfon is not adapted to the stage, nor her qualities to the bufsiness and end of dramatic representation. L'Abbe du Bos has judiciously distinguished the reasons, why allegory is not fit for the drama. What the critic investigated by art and study, the wisdom of nature unfolded to our unlettered Poet, or he would not have refifted the prevalent fashion of his allegorizing age; especially

as

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 abstruse 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 questynge beast received no less honour and improvement from the allegorizing art of Spencer, as has been shewn by a Critic of great learning, ingenuity, and taste, in his observations on the Fairy Queen.

Our first theatrical entertainments, after we emerged from gross barbarism, were of the allegorical kind. The Christmas carol, and carnival shews, the pious pastimes of

our holy-days, were turned into pageantries

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and masques, 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 fong 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 first began to dawn at Athens, and gloriously it shone forth, illumined by every kind of intellectual light.

Shakespear, in the dark shades of Gothic barbarifın, had no resources but in the very phantoms, that walked the night of ignorance and fuperftition: or in touching the latent passions of civil rage and discord: fure to please best his fierce and barbarous audience, when he raised the bloody ghost, or reared the warlike standard, His choice of these subjects 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. Johnfon, more proud of his learning than confident of his genius, was defirous to give a metaphyfical air to his works. He composed many pieces of the allegorical kind, established on the Grecian mythology, and rendered his playhouse a perfect pantheon. - Shakespear difdained these quaint devices; an admirable judge of human nature, with a capacity most extensive, and an invention most happy, he contented himself with giving dramatic manners to History, Sublimity and its appropriated powers and charms to Fiction; and in both these arts he is unequalled. The Cataline and Sejanus of Johnfon are cold, crude, heavy pieces; turgid where they should be great; bombaft where they should be fublime; the sentiments extravagant; the manners exaggerated; and the whole undramatically conducted by long senatorial speeches, and flat plagiarifms from K 4 Tacitu

Tacitus and Sallust. 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 sportfulness and poetical imagination of his fairy tales. Indeed if we compare our countryman in this respect, with the most admired writers of Antiquity, we shall, perhaps, not find him inferior to them. Æschylus, with greater impetuosity of genius than even Shakespear, makes bold incursions into the blind chaos of mingled allegory and fable, but he is not so happy in diffufing the folemn shade; in cafting the dim, religious light that should reign there. When he introduces his furies, and other supernațural beings, he exposes them by too glaring a light; causes affright in the spectator, but never rifes to the imparting that unlimited terror which we feel when Macbeth to his bold address,

* Prologue to the Masque of Qucens.

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