DRAMATIC LITERATURE.


LECTURE I.

Introduction--Spirit of True Criticism--Difference of Taste between the
Ancients and Moderns--Classical and Romantic Poetry and Art--Division of
Dramatic Literature; the Ancients, their Imitators, and the Romantic
Poets.


The object of the present series of Lectures will be to combine the theory
of Dramatic Art with its history, and to bring before my auditors at once
its principles and its models.

It belongs to the general philosophical theory of poetry, and the other
fine arts, to establish the fundamental laws of the beautiful. Every art,
on the other hand, has its own special theory, designed to teach the
limits, the difficulties, and the means by which it must be regulated in
its attempt to realize those laws. For this purpose, certain scientific
investigations are indispensable to the artist, although they have but
little attraction for those whose admiration of art is confined to the
enjoyment of the actual productions of distinguished minds. The general
theory, on the other hand, seeks to analyze that essential faculty of
human nature--the sense of the beautiful, which at once calls the fine
arts into existence, and accounts for the satisfaction which arises from