mas Fitzgerald, commonly called Silken Thomas, son of Gerald, the great Earl of Kildare, who was Lord Deputy of Ireland in the reign of Henry VIII. None of these three dramas have ever been acted.

SIR MARTIN ARCHER SHEE, the late President of the Royal Academy, who died on the 9th of August, 1850, was born in Dublin in 1769, a year memorable for the birth of many distinguished men. The friend of Edmund Burke, and the protegé of Sir Joshua Reynolds, we have no occasion here to descant on his celebrity as a portrait painter, his pretensions as a poet, which were admitted by Lord Byron," while mercilessly lashing nearly all his contemporaries; or his eloquence as an orator, as demonstrated in his annual discourses from the presidential chair. We have to speak more immediately of the tragedy of Alasco, which establishes his title to admission in the band of Irish dramatists. From

the peculiar circumstances connected with it, the play is entitled to a special notice. Alasco was offered, and accepted at Covent Garden, in 1823, when the author was in his fifty-fourth year rather a late period of life to commence a courtship of the dramatic muse-and the treatment which the votary received did not encourage him to repeat his addresses. The principal character was intended for Mr. C. Kemble. The plot may be briefly described as follows. The scene lies in Poland. The principal characters are, Alasco, a young Polish nobleman ; Colonel Walsingham, an Englishman, in the Prussian service; Baron Hohendahl, Governor of a Polish province; Conrad, foster-brother and friend of Alasco; Jerome, the Prior of an Abbey; and Amantha, Walsingham's daughter. The play is written in blank verse. Colonel Walsingham is an ultra-loyalist. He had brought up Alasco as his son, and anxiously desired to have him united to Amantha ; but at the opening of the play he strongly suspects that Alasco wavers in his loyalty, and wishes his daughter to espouse Hohendahl. Alasco avows that he is privately married to Amantha. Hohendahl employs assassins to

murder Walsingham, whose life is saved by Alasco. A plan for an insurrection has been formed, which Alasco had at first discouraged, but when he finds that his countrymen are determined to take up arms, in the hope of recovering their liberty, he thinks it his duty to place himself at their head. The insurgents take the arsenal, and prepare to assault the castle. Hohendahl is a man of too much courage to shelter himself within the walls. He marches out to attack the armed peasantry, whom he looks on with contempt, is defeated, and killed. Walsingham arrives with reinforcements, and the insurgents are subdued. Alasco is taken prisoner, and condemned to the scaffold, in spite of the entreaues of Walsingham. Amantha stabs herself. Walsingham enters, with pardon from the king for Alasco, and amnesty for all. Amantha joins the hands of her father and her husband, and dies. Walsingham is borne off. Alasco kills himself, and falls on the body of Amantha.

There is merit of a superior order, both in the construction and writing of this play, but there is at the same time much ground for objection to those who judge the drama by apostolic principles. The double suicide is not to be justified on christian grounds, neither do the laws of tragedy render it indispensable. The catastrophe might have been reversed, and the end wound up happily, without diminishing the interest or destroying the effect. The burning thirst for stagemurder, with which Voltaire has so justly reproached English taste, has considerably cooled down since he wrote, and more than ever within the last twenty years.

When Alasco was presented in due form to the Lord Chamberlain's office, George Colman had lately been appointed licenser, and having become tenderly sensitive on points of religion and political discipline, he objected to all insertions of the name of the Deity; and ordered the excision of about ninety lines, which bore too strongly upon fervent aspirations after liberty, together with the usual anathemas against tyrants, with their abettors,

satellites, and executioners. It is fortunate that the worthy author of Broad Grins was not in place when Knowles's Virginius and William Tell were offered, or we should have lost or suffered the mutilation of two of our noblest modern dramas. Shee, under indignant feelings, but in temperate and respectful terms, remonstrated with the Duke of Montrose (then Lord Chamberlain), by letter, on the decision of his deputy, saying that the omissions he required would render the work as inconsistent in sense as ridiculous in representation. He concluded by asking his Grace to read the play, and judge for himself. His Grace, as might be expected, declined the invitation, supported his official, and replied as follows:

"Grosvenor-square, 19th Feb., 1824. "SIR,-Thinking Mr. Colman a very sufficient judge of his duty, and as I agree in his conclusion (from the account he has given me of the tragedy called Alasco), I do conclude that, at this time, without considerable omissions, the tragedy should not be acted; and whilst I am persuaded that your intentions are upright, I conceive that it is precisely for this reason (though it may not strike authors), that it has been the wisdom of the Legislature to have an examiner ap pointed, and power given to the Chamberlain of the household to judge whether certain plays should be acted at all, or not acted at particular times. I do not mean to enter into an argument with you, sir, on the subject; but think that your letter, conceived in polite terms to me, calls upon me to return an answer, showing that your tragedy has been well considered.-I remain, sir, with esteem, your obedient servant,

"Martin Archer Shee, Esq., &c."

"MONTROSE.

In 1824, Shee published his play, "as excluded from the stage by the authority of the Lord Chamberlain." In this he strained the fact a little, for Alasco might still have been performed, and very probably would have succeeded, minus the proscribed passages; but the author acted with more spirit than prudence, and withdrew it altogether, rather than submit to what he considered an arbitrary exercise of power. We subjoin two or three samples of the condemned speeches (printed by the author in Italics), that our readers may form their own judgment as to their value and tendency :

"What little skill the patriot sword requires, Our zeal may boast, in midnight vigils school'd; VOL. XLVII.-NO. CCLXXVII.

Those deeper tactics, well contriv'd to work The mere machine of mercenary war,

We shall not need, whose hearts are in the frayWho for ourselves, our homes, our country fight, And feel in every blow we strike for freedom."

"All who dare dispute the claims of pride, Or question the high privilege of oppression."

"Some eland'rous tool of State

Some taunting, dull, unmanner'd deputy-
Some district despot, prompt to play the Tarquin,
And make his power the pander to his lust."

"To brook dishonour from a knave in place,"

"No, no! whate'er the colour of his creed, The man of honour's orthodox,"

"'Tis not rebellion to resist oppression'Tis virtue to avenge our country's wrongs, And self-defence to strike at an usurper.'

"Had fear or feeling sway'd against redress Of public wrong, man never had been free; The thrones of tyrants had been fix'd as fate, And slavery seal'd the universal doom."

If such passages as these, uttered in a play by Poles striking for emancipation from the most brutish tyranny that ever enthralled a nation, are to be considered inflammatory, revolutionary, or dangerous, when spoken to a public audience in England - alas for the government and people of our fair country! The thin-skinned licenser imagined a train of gunpowder where none existed. As Lord Grizzle says of Tom Thumb, "he made the giants first, and then he killed them," and lays himself fairly open to the retort, "qui capit, ille facit." Had the office existed in the days of good Queen Anne of glorious memory, and Colman been the incumbent, Cato would surely have been interdicted, and Booth would never have received the often-commemorated purse of fifty guineas from Lord Bolingbroke, "for so ably defending the cause of liberty against a perpetual dictator."

Shee's preface, which accompanies Alasco, extends to fifty-six pages, and is unnecessarily amplified. He defends himself boldly and eloquently, and retorts with sharp words, but at too great length, on the Lord Chamberlain and his deputy. Neither was there any occasion to step out of his way, and to assert broadly and unjustly that Brooke's Gustavus Vasa was made the vehicle of a pointed satire on kings and priests in general; and that Thompson's Edward and Eleonora was equal

D

ly intended as an instrument of factious hostility against the court and the ministry of the day. He here assumes the office of judge with no better foundation than idle gossip. The two plays he has named furnished the two most glaring instances of the arbitrary exercise of the Licensing Act which had preceded his own case; but neither of them, according to any reasonable deductions, had in view the object imputed. Even the loyal and conscientious Johnson, in his "Lives of the Poets," when alluding to the official treatment of these two productions, observes that it is difficult to discover on what grounds they were suppressed. Johnson, it will be remembered, had an intense horror of republicanism, and the spread of democratic principles.

FREDERIC EDWARD JONES, well known and remembered in Dublin as

having been for many years patentee of the Crow-street theatre, is entitled to a passing mention in this record, as author of The Duke of Burgundy, a tragi-comic play; and Tom Jones, a comedy, adapted from Fielding's celebrated novel-the one produced during the last year of his own management, in 1819; the other at Hawkins'street, in 1826, under Mr. W. Abbott. Neither lived beyond three nights, and have never been revived. The first was acted because the author, then an absolute monarch, willed it; the second, because he wanted a benefit, and his successor felt happy to oblige him. The first was the most ambitious, as being original, but it was at the same time obscure; while the story of the second, as more familiar, enjoyed the advantage of being generally intelligible.

J. W. C.

THERE is an old fable-we would advise none to look it up in Æsop, Pilpay, or Lafontaine-of a worthy autocrat of olden time, who being blessed with an inquiring turn of mind, called together the five hundred sages who adorned his realm, and put to them the following poser—

"If man be nought but a superior animal, tell me, most learned philosophers, in what particular he differs entirely from all the others?"

Five hundred right hands proceeded to stroke five hundred long and hoary beards, and five hundred fore-fingers were applied to the thoughtful wrinkles of five hundred furrowed brows, and for a moment all were deep in thought, while the monarch, delighted at his rivalship of the Sphinx, rubbed his hands in a fever of complacency. At length a hoary septuagenarian made bold to answer

"Oh! mighty Brother of the Sun, and Father of all the Planets! man speaks."

"So does my pet parrot," replied the monarch, "and so do several asses, Balaam's and yourself among the number. Try again."

Then a pottering old buffer, with a head as white as snow, spoke up

"Oh! sire, man builds houses and maketh him divers things.'

"Beavers build houses and birds make nests," answered the sovereign, rubbing his hands ferociously.

Thereupon an aged philosopher made bold to speak

"Sire, man hath reason."

"And how knowest thou, sirrah!" cried the king, savagely," that my pet lap-dog, who whines when I weep, and wags his tail when I laugh, has not as much and more reason than a dotard like thee ?"

And he stamped his foot, and swore upon the big diamond in his royal crown, that all should lose their useless heads if they could not devise an

answer.

Thereat the five hundred beards trembled with mortal anxiety, and the five hundred brows were knit in profoundest thought. And the monarch stamped his foot, "one!" and a shudder shook the infirm forms of all the assembly. Another stamp, "two!" and they all, with one accord, fell on their knees before his irate majesty.

"Spare us!" cried one, as the foot was descending for the third and fatal time. "Spare us, oh, most intimate friend of the divine moon, and first

"No!" roared the monarch in a voice of thunder; "I feed on the people, and ye, vile sons of dogs, have till now been feeding on me. Moreover, all men are food for worms, to say nothing of ghouls, djinns, and vampires. But, by the nose of the Prophet, I will tell you where the difference lies. It is this-that when a man is enraged by a parcel of idiots, who call themselves wise men, he has their heads chopped off with a hatchet, and I'll now prove the case to you practically."

It is scarcely necessary to add, that ere ten minutes had elapsed five hundred aged heads, with five hundred hook noses, and five hundred sweeping white beards, were neatly ranged before the throne of the appeased monarch.

It was these words of this bloodthirsty old Rooshian" (for Turk, which in my younger days was the comprehensive representative of every species of villany, has now become a term of the fondest endearment), which were running loose in my head, as I lay one spring morning in my bed, at a hotel in the Rue de Rivoli.

I

was thinking how true it is that we all feed on one another. I was gloomily meditating on helpless orphans and miteless widows, whose substances had been sucked up by rascals under the wing of the law jackals and vultures incarnate in the persons of attorneys and solicitors; of spendthrift lords squandering at Hamburg or Baden the sovereigns they had wrung from starving tenants in Kent and Yorkshire; and being an author myself- of the villas, and carriages, and dinners revelled in by grinding Sosii, and gained by the labour of other men's brains. It was but a poor consolation that we shall all, publishers and authors, lords and labourers, widows and lawyers, be one day food for those worms, which make no distinction of persons.

It was the carnival at Paris, and I

had been leading what is erroneously 'yclept, a life of gaiety. Never was anything more oppressively lugubrious than the sight of the worldliness of the world during that season in the good city, which they call le paradis des femmes, le purgatoire des maris et l'enfer des vieilles filles. My misanthropy had been brought to a climax the night before, by the banquet of a commercial Lucullus, and a soirée of small talk and scandal at Lady Harriet Backbiter's. In short, I felt as morbid as Rosseau at the Hermitage, or Byron on the Lisbon packet, and as disgusted with life, and suicidal in feelings, as le grand Vatel, when the dinner-bell rang before the turbot had arrived.

I looked out upon the blue sky. "There, at least," I muttered, "is beauty without paint ;" and I thought of the Comtesse de B-, in the hands of her maid and coiffeur. I saw the green tops of the trees in the Tuileries gardens "They, at least, require no padding;" and again my thoughts turned to the old Duke of S, and his confidential tailor. I could bear it no longer, I would get up and throw myself into the arms of Nature.

I rang in vain for my hot water. What! a respectable waiter up before eight impossible! I sacrificed my chin to my misanthropy, dressed and strolled out.

Paris has been described as often as it has been denounced; but, thanks to excursion - trains and offensive alliances, every one begins to know it too well for scribbling travellers any longer to pay their expenses by describing its charms. We have had Paris at noon, Paris in the afternoon, Paris in the evening, and Paris at night, till we know him as well as white-armed Helen could have known his namesake. But we have never heard of Paris in the morning, undressed, unshaven, uncurled, and uncomfortable, for the simple reason that no one has ever been up early enough to see him in that condition. When I speak of morning I mean, of course, the natural morning, which begins with sunrise, for, in point of fact, Paris and London rejoice in many mornings. The morning of those people who lounge in clubs and drive in the Bois-de-Boulogne, begins at mid-day, and, we presume, lasts till

six, since a "morning call" is still made at that hour. The morning of the markets begins at midnight, when, as we don our stiff white neckcloth for some grand festivity, we may hear the heavy rumble of those country carts which supply the city tables with every luxury of the garden and hothouse, from camelias to cabbages. Then, again, in the Quartier St. Antoine morning begins at five; in the Quartier St. Honoré, at ten o'clock; and thus the otherwise short-lived Aurora is civilised into two-thirds of the city's day. The elderly gentleman who views his own portrait, taken when yet in long-clothes, and smiles at its naïve simplicity, where now is the dignified expression of a pater familias, or the flaxen and silky locks on a crown that has now yielded to the hyacinthan charms of an "invisible head of hair," could not be more astonished at the metamorphosis, than the idler of the Champs Elysees at the appearance of Paris before its morning toilette.

The sturdy gens d'armes, and the hard-handed workman, whistling as he goes, are the only treaders of a trottoir which we are accustomed to see covered by rustling silks or sleek patent-leathers. The early cart has not yet removed those miscellaneous heaps of refuse which form the world of some groping chiffonnier, whose constant dream is the discovery of some lost diamond, or mislaid bank-note, amid the rubbish. The smoke of a million hearths has not yet leadened the pure blue of heaven, nor filled the air with that heavy and healthless odour which for ever stamps the climate of a city. The gay shops are still closed, and all but the poor and the hardworking are still slumbering away the best hours of the day. There is a melancholy beauty about this unenjoyed freshness, this unheeded sunshine of the day's childhood, which is an excellent cure for dyspeptic morbidness, as I found it; and morning in a city where man's works are, and man himself is not, visible, if less beautiful, is scarcely less interesting, than day dawning on the Righi or the Pyramids. For my part, I felt like a demon set down in the middle of Paradise; I blushed at my own unworthiness of such pure enjoyment as a fresh, unladen breeze, and the sun's smiles through an unpolluted atmosphere. I, so blaze, that cham

pagne was but water to me, and imperial tokay mere small-beer-I, whom the wiles and smiles of all the coryphées at the grand opera could not have aroused from insensibility-I, in short, for whom nothing on earth had any longer a charm, save, perhaps, Blind Hookey for "ponies," or a scandalous libel on one's best friend my spirits rose from "dull and murky" to "fair weather" at once, and I walked on with a bounding step, drinking in the novel pleasure of animal exhilira

tion.

Mine was not the only step that pressed lightly on the flags. Before me trod a figure which at any other moment would have passed unnoticed. All I saw was the graceful form of a young woman, covered with an old shawl of that speckled pattern which answers in France to our coarse whittle. The bonnet was of black straw, with a single neat but not over-fresh ribbon passed across it, and the whole costume was that of some respectable workwoman. However, whether it were my own unusual good temper, or a certain elegance beneath the humble garb, I felt an anxiety to see the features concealed from me, and followed the shawl and bonnet, as in my younger days I had curiously pursued a cashmere and flounces, often to be disappointed by the face of a negress or the wrinkles of fifty autumns. I soon perceived that the incognita was not unaccompanied. little boy of four years old, with a head of flaxen curls, and a face beaming with the innocence of childhood, ran on before her, and, as she turned down another street, I could hear a voice of ringing music calling to the little truant "Komm her, Kärlchen!"

A

She was, then, a German ; one, perhaps, of those many industrious Teutons who undergo a voluntary exile from their "Vaterland," attracted by by the higher wages of a Paris manufactory. This was a disappointment; for two seasons passed at Berlin and Dresden, and three summers wasted at Hamburg and Baden, had inspired me with a sincere aversion to the heavy and coarse character of those sourkraut philosophers. Still, the "blueeyed daughters of the Rhine" found favour in Byron's eyes, and I followed her in silence.

She turned into the Marché St.