ance and fuperftition: or in touching the latent paffions of civil rage and discord : fure to please best his fierce and barbarous audience, when he raised the bloody ghost, or reared the warlike ftandard. His choice of thefe 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 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 Catiline and Sejanus of Johnson 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 speeches, and flat plagiarisms from Tacitus and Salluft. Such of this author's pieces as he boasts to be grounded on antiquity and folid learning, and to lay hold on removed myfteries *, have neither the majesty of Shakespear's serious fables, nor the pleasing 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 shall, perhaps, not find him inferior to them. Æfchylus, with greater impetuofity of genius than even Shakespear, makes bold incurfions into the blind chaos of mingled allegory and fable, but he is not fo happy in diffusing the folemn fhade; in casting the dim, religious light that should reign there. When he introduces his Furies, and other # Prologue to the Mafque of Queens. fuper fupernatural 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, How now! ye fecret, foul, and midnight hags, is answered, 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 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 justice, not to demand the public trial of guilty men. They must lose much of the fear and reverence in which they were held for their fecret influence on the mind, and the terrors they could inflict on criminal conscience, when they were represented as obliged to have recourse to the ordinary method of revenge, by being witneffes and pleaders in a court of juftice, to obtain the corporal punishment of the offender. Indeed, it is poffible, that the whole ftory of this play might be allegorical, as thus, that Oreftes, haunted by the terrors which pursue the guilty mind, confeffed his crime to the Areopagus, with all the aggravating circumstances remorfe fuggested to him, from a pious defire to expiate his offence, by fubmitting to whatever sentence this respectable affembly should pronounce for that purpofe. The oracle which commanded him to put put Clytemnestra to death, would plead for him with his judges; their voices being equal for abfolving or punishing, wisdom gives her vote for abfolving him. The sentiment that appears fo odd in the mouth of the goddess, from these considerations, that she is little affected by the circumstance of Clytemnestra's relation to the murderer, because she herself had no mother, means only that justice is not governed by any affection or perfonal confideration, but acts by an invariable and general rule. If the oracle commanded, and the laws justified the act of Oreftes, by appointing the next in blood to avenge the murder, then other circumstances of a special and inferior kind, were not to have any weight. I am inclined to think this tragedy is a mixture of History and Allegory. Æfchylus affected the allegorical manner so much, as to form a tragedy, called the Balance, upon the allegory in Homer, of Jupiter's weighing the fates of Hector and Achilles*; and it is * Apud Plut. de modo leg. poëtas. apparent, |