that they were introduced instead of the moral quality, for which they
were so noted;--and in this manner the stage was moving on to the
absolute production of heroic and comic real characters, when the
restoration of literature, followed by the ever-blessed Reformation, let
in upon the kingdom not only new knowledge, but new motive. A useful
rivalry commenced between the metropolis on the one hand, the residence,
independently of the court and nobles, of the most active and stirring
spirits who had not been regularly educated, or who, from mischance or
otherwise, had forsaken the beaten track of preferment,--and the
universities on the other. The latter prided themselves on their closer
approximation to the ancient rules and ancient regularity--taking the
theatre of Greece, or rather its dim reflection, the rhetorical
tragedies of the poet Seneca, as a perfect ideal, without any critical
collation of the times, origin, or circumstances;--whilst, in the mean
time, the popular writers, who could not and would not abandon what they
had found to delight their countrymen sincerely, and not merely from
inquiries first put to the recollection of rules, and answered in the
affirmative, as if it had been an arithmetical sum, did yet borrow from
the scholars whatever they advantageously could, consistently with their
own peculiar means of pleasing.

And here let me pause for a moment's contemplation of this interesting
subject.

We call, for we see and feel, the swan and the dove both transcendantly
beautiful. As absurd as it would be to institute a comparison between
their separate claims to beauty from any abstract rule common to both,
without reference to the life and being of the animals themselves,--or
as if, having first seen the dove, we abstracted its outlines, gave them
a false generalization, called them the principles or ideal of