The blind and vulgar prejudice in favour of Shakspeare, Massinger, and the
elder dramatic poets--the sickening adulation bestowed upon Sheridan
Knowles and Talfourd, among the moderns--and the base, malignant, and
selfish partiality of theatrical managers, who insist upon performing
those plays only which are adapted to the stage--whose grovelling souls
have no sympathy with genius--whose ideas are fixed upon gain, have
hitherto smothered those blazing illuminati, George Stephens and his
syn--Syncretcis; have hindered their literary effulgence from breaking
through the mists hung before the eyes of the public, by a weak,
infatuated adherence to paltry Nature, and a silly infatuation in favour
of those who copy her.

At length, however, the public blushes (through its representative, the
provincial press, and the above-named critical puffs,) with shame--the
managers are fast going mad with bitter vexation, for having, to use the
words of that elegant pleonasm, the _introductory_ preface, "by a sort of
_ex officio_ hallucination," rejected this and some twenty other
exquisite, though unactable dramas! It is a fact, that since the opening
of the English Opera House, Mr. Webster has been confined to his room;
Macready has suspended every engagement for Drury-lane; and the managers
of Covent Garden have gone the atrocious length of engaging sibilants and
ammunition from the neighbouring market, to pelt the Syncretics off the
stage! Them we leave to their dirty work and their repentance, while we
proceed to _our_ "delightful task."

To prove that the "mantle of the Elizabethan poets seems to have fallen
upon Mr. Stephens" (_Opinions_, p. 11), that the "Hungarian Daughter" is
quite as good as Knowles's best plays (_Id._ p. 4, _in two places_), that
"it is equal to Goethe" (_Id._ p. 11), that "in after years the name of