No actor has appeared in our time with such a power of selfexcitement; and if he can rein-in this invaluable but yet dangerous faculty, and subdue it to his will-presuming his will to be directed by more than common intelligence-it will carry him much farther than it has yet done, and towards loftier efforts in his art than mere burlesque and farce can find place for. His performance of Desmarets, in Plot and Passion, had passages which electrified the audience.

We have left ourselves little space to speak of the publicthat important agent in dramatic presentation, in the double capacity of audience and critic. Audiences come to the theatre to be amused. In old times there was little choice of amusement. Shakespeare had to contend only with rival companies and the bear-garden. Ben Jonson found the puppets formidable competitors of actors of flesh and blood. In later times the opera divided with the theatre the fashionable world of pleasure-seekers. But now amusements for mind and senses woo the world of London at every turn. Lecture-rooms, dioramas, panoramas, cheap concerts, oratorios, public gardens, and innumerable other diversions, suited to every scale of purse and every variety of taste and cultivation, prefer their rival claims with all the arts of puff and poster, advertisement and woodcut. Tired with work of hand or brain, wearied out with the prosecution of our special branch of that one business of all of us-money-making, we are growing every day less and less disposed to all employments of our leisure which take us from our chimney-corners to tax the brain or excite any nerves but the risible ones. The world and the world's work is most easily forgotten in laughter, or in pleasure of the senses. We can read and think at home. We come to the theatre to laugh, or to see a show, or to have our ears tickled. Still, shows may be tasteful and informing, music ennobling as well as sweet, and sound lessons may be insinuated in laughter. And, as things are nowadays, for a manager who does not aspire to grand and elaborate pageantry, and who has not the aid of opera, "ridendo dicere verum" would seem about the highest aim open to the artists of the theatre, until some daring genius ventures to lift the veil which hides the dark undercurrents and deep abysses of modern society. Of the public in its capacity of critic we cannot speak with any satisfaction. Stagecriticism has fallen into bad hands, and is executed under conditions which go far to make it utterly worthless. Most of the dramatic critics for the newspapers are themselves dramatic authors, and self-interest and private intimacies check their pens and sway their judgments. Theatrical criticism is reduced to a mere compterendu of plots, wound up by a jingle of cut-and-dry phrases in praise or blame of the actors. It may be that the majority of our

pieces and our actors deserve nothing better. If so, the critics should at least avow this in excuse for the slightness of their work, and should support their avowal by greater care whenever the merits or demerits of play or performer justify it. The elevation of the standard of theatrical criticism is one of the indispensable conditions, and most powerful means, towards the improvement of our stage.

The preceding remarks may appear harsh: at all events they are honestly meant. It seems to us inevitable, that any writer on the present aspect of theatrical matters who entertains respect for the dramatic art should dwell more on the blemishes than on the beauties, on the failings than on the felicities, of our contemporary theatre. That any isolated piece of criticism, such as this, will have much effect, is not to be hoped. We must be satisfied with having pointed out some of the chief reasons why the stage has so far ceased to be an art, while it continues to be so favourite an amusement; and we will conclude with an expression of our hope that we may live to see it more of the one, without being less of the other.

ART. VII. THE POLITICAL TENDENCIES OF AMERICA.

Things as they are in America. By William Chambers. Edinburgh and London, 1854.

Life of Horace Greeley, Editor of the New-York Tribune. By J. Parton. New York, 1855.

Notes on Public Subjects, made during a Tour in the United States and in Canada. By H. Seymour Tremenheere. London, 1852. The Constitution of the United States compared with our own. By H. Seymour Tremenheere. London, 1855.

Private Correspondence of Henry Clay. By C. Cotton, LL.D. New York, 1856.

IN the whole range of political and social questions there are none surpassing in speculative interest or urgent practical importance those involved in the relations between Great Britain and the United States; and these have rarely been more critical or more interesting than at the present moment. The actual excitement may, and we doubt not will, pass away; the menacing danger of a quarrel, artificial in its origin and almost ludicrously insignificant in its ostensible pretext, may be averted by tranquil patience on the one side, and the subsidence of effervescing feeling on the other: but the real and fundamental causes which have led to both are deep-seated and abiding, and as long

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as they remain undiminished and uncomprehended, the passion and the peril may at any instant be renewed.

There are no two countries on the earth a thorough and perennial cordiality of friendship between whom is so essential to their own comfort or to human progress. Bound together heart and hand, each would be invulnerable; a close and confiding union might enable them not only to defy the world and to control it, but-what is incomparably more important-to point its course, to aid its development, to guide and uphold its footsteps to a destiny as noble and a position as enviable as our own. Severed from one another, divided by mutual suspicions, harassed by mutual animosity, weakened by mutual strife secret or avowed, we can never be any thing else than a drag upon each other's progress, a thorn in each other's side, a tool for the interests and passions of other states to work with, a scandal to the cause of popular government, and a barrier to the spread of liberty and peace.

No nations, it would seem, ought to understand each other so thoroughly or to love each other so well. Our blood is closely allied; our institutions are very similar; our language and religion are almost identical; our pursuits and our character present far more points of resemblance than of difference, and far more than we have in common with any other people; and our commercial relations are on a scale of magnitude and intimacy such as the world has never yet witnessed in any age or in any quarter. Yet, in spite of all this, there exist causes of dislike, distrust, ill-appreciation, and hostility, which it appears almost impossible to eradicate-which keep us constantly asunder, and frequently embitter and exasperate our intercourse to a degree which reaches nearly to the boiling-point. Unlucky historical antecedents; one war in which America was signally successful ; another in which England was unquestionably in the wrong; contiguity of frontier; the tone of quiet and domineering superiority not unreasonable in a nation which has grown old amid centuries of grandeur; the jealous and irritable susceptibility not unnatural in a nation young, vain, and ambitious of distinction, conscious of vast energies, and confident in a mighty future, but fretted by misgivings lest its position should not be fully recognised, and therefore on the watch for every semblance of a slight; the usual restless inclination of an adolescent athlete to measure himself with a champion of established fame; a certain steady degradation in the Transatlantic institutions, which makes them year by year less in harmony with our own; the perpetual augmentation of the population of the Union by discontented and turbulent emigrants from Europe, whose hatred to England is at once a passion and a creed; and, finally, the

existence of a special "domestic institution" in America, which we regard with condemnation and abhorrence, and which they themselves in secret feel to be a danger, an embarrassment, and a reproach, but in public think it necessary to defend with the vehemence and anger with which men always defend their vulnerable points;-all these things are perpetual sources of irritation and misunderstanding, which operate powerfully to "separate chief friends," and to make "a man's foes those of his own household," or at least of his own race.

Yet there is no nation on the earth whom it so much imports us to study and to read aright as the American. We may learn from them many things in the way of warning, and some things also in the way of stimulus and of example. We see in them a sort of caricature or exaggeration of what we once were, and of what we may possibly become. We may trace in their conduct, their character, and their tendencies, some of our past vices and many of our future dangers. They are proceeding at full swing in a course which we are just entering with hesitating and reluctant footsteps, but along which a numerous and energetic party are anxious to hurry us with accelerated pace. They have already made many changes in their institutions which we are just beginning to contemplate as possible. They are now feeling, by ample and sad experience, some of those mischievous results which we as yet see only as speculative consequences, or of the first faint actual pressure of which we are barely beginning to be sensible. They are trying constitutional experiments which their singular social condition enables them to try with inconsiderable risk, but which England could not venture on except at the hazard of her very existence. It behoves us, then, to watch them with the most vigilant attention; to make the results of their experience our own, without incurring its hazards; to use them as vicarious sufferers; and to profit alike by their trials, their achievements, and their failures. Seventy-five years ago they had a political constitution not very dissimilar from our own, but very dissimilar from what theirs now is: since then, all their movements have been, as all ours now are, towards a more and more unmodified democracy. Have the results in the United States been such as to afford matter for congratulation to them, or matter of beckoning encouragement to us?

With regard to the state of feeling between the people of England and of the United States a misconception exists on both sides of the water, which it is most important to clear up. Americans who come over to this country for the first time are commonly surprised at the frank cordiality of their reception, and express their agreeable disappointment with a naïveté which shows what a very different welcome they anticipated. Here and

there, indeed, a spoiled Yankee of inordinate conceit and offensive manners meets with the same ridicule or the same repulse in society as he would have done had he belonged to any other country, or been a native of our own: he sets down as an insult to his nation the rebuffs which his own individual arrogance or vulgarity has brought upon him, and returns, soured and malignant, to his own shores, to console himself by spreading misrepresentation and ill-will. But, these rare exceptions apart, the feeling of Americans, on landing in England, is that we have described. They find every where the greatest interest felt as to the progress of their wonderful country; profound admiration of its energy; and a somewhat excessive disposition to hold it up for envy, and to use it as an instrument for depreciating ourselves. They find every American author of real eminence read here nearly as widely as there-applauded quite as generously, appreciated quite as justly; they find Longfellow the most popular living poet next to Tennyson; they find Channing ranking among our most valued divines, Kent and Story among our most eminent jurists, Prescott among our first-rate historians, Cooper and Washington Irving among our most universally read authors in the lighter paths of literature. They meet, too, on all hands, with the most earnest and genuine expressions of a wish for cordial amity and alliance, and the deepest regret at any subject of dispute or alienation that may have arisen between the nations. And if they are gentlemen by education and breeding, they experience no difficulty-quite as little, certainly, as an Englishman would do-in gaining access to the best society which the old country can produce.

A similar agreeable surprise awaits the Englishman who visits the United States. He was prepared, perhaps, by the perusal of American newspapers and American history, as well as by books of travels, to be received with some roughness, and not a little suspicion and dislike. He finds every house most hospitably open to him, a willingness to show him every kindness and to do him all honour. He observes an almost over-anxious desire for the good opinion of England-a sort of unavowed and perhaps unconscious feeling that America can scarcely trust her own estimate of herself and her achievements till the stamp of English appreciation has been set upon them. In discussing political matters, he finds always great shrewdness and usually great fairness and candour-a willingness to admit what is regretable, perilous, or culpable in their own institutions and proceedings-and a disposition to do full justice to whatever is admirable and stable and dignified in the cha tution of Great Brita

society he frequents