Canova's fine talents were enhanced by his virtues, and the generosity of his disposition. He was modest and unassuming; candid and sincere; disinterested and benevolent, in the extreme. He was free from petty professional jealousies, and equally free from national vanity and prejudice. He had studied from the Italian models, and particularly from the works of Michael Angelo. -These he held up as the perfection of art; but when in the latter part of his life he had an opportunity of seeing the Elgin Marbles, his elevation of mind soared above all his former prepossessions, and national partialities; and, alive to the beauties of these surprising monuments of Greece, he at once pronounced that they would infallibly throw all other antique statuary and sculpture into comparative disrepute.

Canóva's attempts at painting are said to have been abortive. As a sculptor, his genius reached the correct and beautiful rather than the sublime. He had not formed his early studies in the severe school of Grecian art; fancy and an elegant imagination pervade his works, and it is singular, that, although he was acutely sensible to all the softer emotions and tender sympathies of life, he never made any figure which can be cited as an example, or even an attempt at the pathetic. Canóva had no rival, and it is, at least, premature, to oppose to him an artist so little known to Europe in general, as Thorvaldsen, the sculptor of Copenhagen. All comparisons, between Canóva and our own celebrated artists, are rendered nugatory by the different schools in which they respectively excel.

Canova's genius was not precoce, and his first works not only did not afford any promise of future excellence, but they did not display any of that character of mind which is so decidedly stamped upon his maturer productions. His two baskets of fruit were certainly finished in an elaborate manner for a boy of fourteen; his next work, Eurydice, was without any decided character, and of little merit; and his Orpheus was by no means a happy production, even for a student. His Dæ dalus and Icarus was esteemed a tame imitation of a bad model injudiciously selected. The cast from

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this group was preserved by Canóva in his gallery, whether from any esteem for it we do not know, but it certainly may serve as a proof of the immeasurable superiority to which he afterwards attained. The composition of the Mausoleum of Pope Clement XIV. is but indifferent, but the fine head of the old man offering the bust of the Pope was a decided ray of his awakened genius. His next work, Cupid and Psyche, was graceful, but it betrayed labour and study-faults from which all his subsequent works were free. Psyche standing, Venus and Adonis, and Mary Magdalen followed in succession; this last statue is one of the happiest productions of Canóva's chissel. His next work, Cupid and Psyche standing, had the unpardonable fault of Cupid's figure being more delicate than that of the female. His Perseus, with the head of Medusa, was always undervalued by its having been destined to replace the Apollo Belvidere, after that antique had been carried to Paris by Buonaparte. His Athletes, Krengan and Damaxenes, produced much effect upon the public. His Hebe has been justly admired by all Europe. His statue of the Mother of Napoleon is a noble work; it carries in it a conviction of its being a correct likeness of the individual, and yet bears that stamp of mighty power which would lead the beholder to mistake it for a work of high imagination, were you not acquainted with the exalted mind and character of her whom it is designed to represent. It is beyond our limits, however, to indulge in criticism upon each individual work of this great man. If we cannot give him the fame of a Phidias, a Praxitiles, or even of a Michael Angelo, we must acknowledge, that he is destined to occupy a distinguished place in the line of great masters. He had beauties peculiarly his own; for grace of posture and of action, for that perfection of parts and harmony of union which produce the effect of loveliness, and for that animation which deludes us into a belief of reality, his nymphs are unrivalled; they create what may be called a chaste voluptuousness, and revive in the mind some of the fictions of the ancient poets.

THE Drama, from its first appear-, ance in the heroic days of ancient Greece, down to the present era, has occupied more attention than any other department of literature. The great productions of Hesiod, of Herodotus, of Thucydides, or even the Father of Poetry, the immortal Homer, attracted a less powerful attention than the tragedies of Eschylus and Sophocles, the effusions of the pathetic Euripides, or the comedies of the licentious Aristophanes, and the more chaste and elegant Menander. This was to be accounted for by their embodying feelings, which were at issue with the deepest sensations of the human soul, and the publicity of appeal to the passions of the assembled multitude on representation. History and poetry have to make their way in the solitude of leisure, and the silence of the closet; they form their impressions, not so much by striking on the senses, and acting on the passions, as by being approved by our judgment, and agreeing with our feelings. The Drama, though it demands to be censured in judgment, awakes the senses to judge. It addresses itself to thousands, who come with feelings too strongly excited for mere sober narration, or beautiful imagery, and which require to be sustained by powerful and continued incident and action. If the author flag, or the actor prove unequal, the spirits of the auditory become cold and languid; the tension of interest requires to be supported to the last, and the crowded audience to be dismissed with feelings too much warmed for discrimination, and too rapturous for the niceties of critical coldness or reproof.

In Ancient Greece, the Drama had its commencement in religion: the Feast of the Goat, the Song of the Vintage, and the Hymns in Honour of Bacchus, sung by the rustic revellers, who appeared with their faces stained with the lees of wine, shew the humility of its origin.It was enlarged by the dark genius of the terrible Eschylus, and the divine Sophocles, and those harrowing representations brought forward,

Eur. Mag. Vol. 82.

which appalled the audience, in the presages of fate, the presence of the furies, and the awful visitations of the gods. To them succeeded the mournful and tender Euripides, less terrible in his imagery, but with more of nature; lofty hymns, in honour of the gods, mixed with the chorus, which intimated the moral of the play, and instructed and warned the beholders. The Altar to the Divinity, which appeared upon, the stage, supported the religious spirit of the performance, and gave solemnity to the representation.The interest excited in Greece by these exhibitions was intense; in this colder climate, and more advanced state of civilization, the appearance of actors on an immense stage, disguised with masks, formed at the mouth like trumpets for the enlargement of the voice, and elevated on the lofty buskin to supernatural stature, could, from their want of resemblance to any thing like human life, create neither interest nor effect; but in Greece, in, those days of mythology and heroic daring, the impression was different. In that delightful climate, the vast theatre, whose roof was the cloudless heavens, was crowded with spectators, who sate whole days at its lengthened representations. They were delighted to see embodied be fore them the resemblance of Hercules, of Theseus, of those victors and heroes who had become immortal by their valour, and lived in the songs and annals of their country. They looked on their attendance as a worship due to these, their great progenitors, and grateful to their divinities, as a sacrifice offered at their shrine. In Greece, the profession of an actor carried with it respect, and honour, and reward; the generals and warriors who commanded in their armies, and their fleets, often appeared after on their stage; it was consecrated by the incense of religion, and supported by the fervour of popular veneration. So enthusiastic and devoted was the attachment of the people to it, that one of their historians re lates, that, on the fatal intelligence arriving at Athens of the disastrous

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failure of an expedition against Messina in Sicily, at a moment when the people were assembled at the theatre, and when, independent of the loss sustained by the country, each individual almost of the thousands then present had to mourn a relative or a friend; they disdained to quit their seats, or retire from the theatre, but spread their cloaks in mournful silence before their faces, and then desired the representation to go on.

The power and influence of Pericles, in latter days, was preserved almost as much by the large sums devoted by him to the support of the theatre, as by his victories in the Archipelago, on the coast of Lonia, or the spoils of those triumphs which he devoted to the erection of the Parthenon, and those works of immortal art and genius with which he embellishsd Athens, and which have handed his name to all succeeding ages. It is true, that when wealth and corruption had brought effeminacy and slavery into Greece, and virtue and valour were nearly no more, that the theatre became one of the principal sources of enervation and luxury. The comedies of Aristophanes were directed to slander and ridicule every thing that still survived of patriotism or public virtue in Athens; and its inhabitants are reproached by Demosthenes, in one of his imperishable orations, for being found crowned with garlands within its walls, when the arms and policy of Philip were triumphing throughout Greece, and carrying conquest and dominion to their very gates. But with the slavery of Greece came on the slavery of genius also; and on becoming a province of the Roman empire, the reign of the Drama departed alto gether. To the tragic poets and historians of former days succeeded a race of miserable sophists, and the product of a frail and false philosophy.

On the Greek Drama itself, it may be necessary to dwell shortly, to account why, possessed as i it is of all the splendour of diction and the beauty of poetry, praised by the profoundest scholars and the ablest critics, it yet never could be popular on any modern stage. The foundation of ancient tragedy is its endless

mythology; which, though then beheld by the majority with awe and veneration, could scarcely now afford a theme for the youngest school-boy, and would be ridiculous as the subject of a modern tragedy. What, according to the celebrated Gibbon, was even in that day viewed by contemporary philosophers with cold and scrutinizing scepticism, would now be beheld with incredulous disdain. The mythology of the Ancients, always at war with sober reason, was deeply at issue with morality beside. Those beings, whom their fancy had raised to a rank of supernatural power, they yet represented as possessed of passions, and stained with crimes, which on earth would be visited with execration and horror. They are all drawn as darkly malignant, meanly vindictive, and jealous to the last degree of their individual privileges of sacrifice and worship. Always present, either visibly or invisibly, they constitute the great material of the Drama, presenting characters, which, as mortals, we should be sure to exe erate, and which, as divinities, only excite in us deeper abhorrence and detestation. If one dark and overpowering impression of the power of those deities (abstracted for a moment from their benevolence and justice) were the result of a representation of this kind, the grandeur of that impression might, in some degree, atone for its falsity and immorality. But nothing like this awful singleness of effect can follow the exhibition of Greek tragedy. The gods appear with passions debased far below mortals; in power, and its exercise, as far and fatally above them; in their mutual intercourse, there is all the littleness of mortality amongst them, and their hatred to each other appears heavier, if possible, than that they delight to heap upon their human victims.One final remark may be necessary on the Greek Drama, founded like the preceding ones, on that false and licentious mythology, which forms its entire essence. There is no view we can take of the sufferings of humanity, amidst its various miseries, more appalling than that, in which it is denied all the comforts of conscious virtue, and all the consolations of future happiness and

reward. The deities of the Greek mythology and Drama are so intent on spreading universal wretchedness around them, and aggravating all the endurance of human existence, that they appear neither to have thought nor inclination to give their favourites or victims a hope or prospect from futurity. Around the hapless personages of that Drama, all is suffering, all beyond obscurity and darkness, presenting to the despairing mind a moral desert, without one green spot to cheer or enliven, or even the deception of a mirage, to allure, for a moment, by the bril liancy of its seduction.

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Rome, that adopted the mytholoand religion of Greece, and formed her philosophers and poets on her model, did not as warmly adopt and revive her Drama: dominion and conquest were the Roman principles, and to these they thought the combats of gladiators and the bloody exhibitions of the Circus better suited. The tragedies of Seneca, the works of Plautus, and the comedies of Terence, formed on the model of Menander, may be cited as instances that the Drama flourished and was cherished in Rome; but these exceptions amid the current of centuries only prove the assertion, that among the Romans it ne ver found a genial soil. The trage dies of Seneca, even now, are little known, and in Rome were never popular. The works of Plautus seldom appeared on the stage, and, though the comedies of Terence were more familiar to the people, they never succeeded so far as to change the general taste and feeling for other exhibitions. The great Roman actor, Roscius, the friend of Pompey and the first Patricians in Rome, has been mentioned as an instance of the celebrity attendant on histrionic genius, and the eminence it was sure to attain. But though a few of the enlightened citizens, educated in the arts and philosophy of Greece, were able to prize that distinguished portion of its earliest literature, and to give due merit and protection to the actor who gave it life and being on the Roman stage, yet the general feeling of the people of that vast city, or the great capitals spread throughout the empire, was any thing but favourable to its

growth or display; to them the dys ing gladiator, fed on succulent herbs that his blood on each wound might flow more freely, was an object of far more interest. The bloody com bats of wild beasts within the arena of the Circus, or a naumachia, a seas fight, awakened far deeper feelings. The licentious populace of Rome, fed with the measures of Africa, were cruel and sanguinary; and though Nero attired as a singer, amid his appalling atrocities, appeared in the theatre and sought in that garb for popular applause; the presence of the savage Commodus in the amphitheatre, and the slaughter of animals by his mooned arrows, were more congenial to the feelings of a Roman populace, and were received with louder expressions of triumph and approbation.

With the removal of the seat of empire to Byzantium, by Constantine, the Drama did not follow; with an eastern capital oriental manners and customs (long prevailing) were also adopted. The freedom of the Drama seems unsuited to Asiatic ty ranny and debasement, and China appears to be almost the only country in Asia where any representation of the kind was known to prevail. In Constantinople the vast Hippo drome and its chariot races superseded all other popular exhibitions→→→ there were originated those factions distinguished by their respective emblems of green or blue, which divided the feelings of the spectators, and subsequently carried faction and bloodshed through every quarter of Byzantium. It was in the free ages of Greece that the Drama had its origin, and that its sublimest efforts were matured, and it fell with the liberties of the country which had raised and strengthened it; Roman freedom had ceased for centu ries before the western capital was deserted; and the transfer of the centre of empire to the shores of the Bosphorus brought with it little of science or of genius. Greece and Byzantium both were debased under a succession of oriental despots, and contained little at the fall of the eastern empire beyond a crowd of trembling slaves, incapable alike of virtue or of science: with the capture of Constantinople by Mahomet 11. and the sabre of his savage