make all poetical form an impossibility; for we know that the mythological and historical persons did not speak our language, that passionate grief does not express itself in verse, and so forth. What an unpoetical playgoer were that, who, instead of following up the events with his sympathy, should, like a gaoler, with watch or hour-glass in hand, count out to the heroes of the tragedy the hours they have yet to live and act! Is our soul then a piece of clock-work, telling hours and minutes so infallibly? Nay, has it not quite different measures of time for the state of agreeable occupation, and for that of tedium? In the former, under an easy and varied activity, the hours fly apace; in the latter, we feel all the faculties of the soul impeded, and the hours are lengthened out into infinitude. Thus is it in the present, but in memory quite the reverse: the interval of dead and empty uniformity shrinks up and vanishes altogether; that which is distinguished by an abundance of multifarious impressions grows and widens in the same proportion. Our body is subject to the outward astronomical time, inasmuch as our organic actions are thereby measured; but our mind has its own ideal time, which is no other than the consciousness of the progressive development of our being. In such a chronometry, the intervals occupied by an indifferent pause go for nothing, and two important moments, though they lie years apart, link themselves immediately to each other. Thus, when we have been busily engaged with any thing before we fell asleep, we often resume the same train of thoughts as soon as we are awake, and the dreams which filled up the interval recede into their unsubstantial obscurity. Even so it is with the dramatic exhibition : our imagination passes lightly over the times which are presupposed and intimated, but omitted, as being marked by nothing note-worthy, to fix itself solely on the decisive moments, by condensation of which the poet gives wings to the lazy course of hours and days.

"But," it will be objected, "the ancient tragedians, surely, observed the Unity of Time." This expression is very incorrect; it ought at least to be called the identity of the imaginary with the material time. But, taken in that sense, it does not apply to the ancients: what they observe is only the seeming indifference of time. Observe well, the seeming-for they certainly

allow themselves to make a greater advance during the choral odes, than could be made during the material time of their performance. In Eschylus' Agamemnon the entire interval from the destruction of Troy to his arrival in Mycenae is comprised in the action, and this interval must have been no inconsiderable number of days; in Sophocles' Trachinians the voyage from Thessaly to Euboea is thrice accomplished in the course of the play; in Euripides' Suppliants we have, during a single ode, the entire march of an army from Athens against Thebes, the battle is fought, and the general returns victorious. So far were the Greeks from troubling themselves about such petty calculations! But as for the seeming indifference of time, they had a particular ground for observing that; namely, the constant presence of the chorus. Where the chorus actually does leave the stage, the regular progress is interrupted; of which procedure there is a striking instance in Æschylus' Eumenides, for the whole space of time which Orestes needed for conveying himself from Delphi to Athens is omitted. Again, between the three component plays of a trilogy, which were acted one after another, and were intended to compose a whole, there are gaps of time as considerable as there are between the three acts of many a Spanish comedy.

The moderns, in the division of their plays into acts, which, properly speaking, were unknown to the Greek Tragedy, have found a convenient means of extending the compass of the imaginary time without incongruity. For thus much the poet may fairly expect from the spectator's imagination, that while the representation is wholly suspended, he should conceive a longer time to have elapsed than that which is measured by the rhythmical time of the music between the acts: otherwise it might be as well to invite him to come and see the next act to-morrow, that he may find it all the more natural. The division into acts, properly speaking, was occasioned by the omission of the chorus in the New Comedy. Horace lays down the law, that a tragedy should have neither more nor less than five acts. The rule is so unessential, that Wieland thought Horace must have wished to make a joke of the young Pisos, by inculcating a precept like this in such a solemn tone, as if it were a matter of the last importance. If in ancient Tragedy the end of an act

be fixed where the stage is empty, and the chorus is left alone to perform its dance and ode, we may often count less than five acts, but often also more than five. Taken as a remark, that in an exhibition of two or three hours in length, there ought to be pretty nearly that number of rests for the attention, it may be allowed to pass. Considered in any other way, I should be curious to hear a reason grounded upon the nature of Dramatic Poetry, why a play must have just five divisions, and no more. But tradition and prescription rule the world: a smaller number of acts has been tolerated; to transgress the consecrated number, five, has been ever looked upon as an atrocious and perilous piece of audacity'.

As a general rule, the division into acts seems to me erroneous when there is no progress (as is the case in many modern plays), and when the opening of the new act exhibits the persons in exactly the same posture of affairs as at the close of the preceding. And yet this stand-still has given much less offence than the assumption of a considerable interval, and of incidents omitted in the representation; the reason for which forbearance is, that the former is merely a negative offence.

The romantic dramatists allow themselves to change the scene even in the course of an act. As the stage is always previously left empty, there is, in each instance, an interruption of the continuity, to warrant them in their assumption of the same number of intervals. If we take offence at this, but allow the division into acts, we have only to consider these breaks as a greater number of small acts. But then it will be objected that this is to justify one error by another, the violation of the Unity of Time by that of the Unity of Place: we will, therefore, consider more at length how far this latter rule is indispensable.

In Aristotle, as I have already observed, it is in vain to look for any expression on the subject. But the ancients, it is maintained, observed this Unity. Not invariably, only in general. Among seven plays of Eschylus, and the same number of Sophocles, there are two, namely, Eumenides and Ajax, in which there is a change of scene. That they generally retain

Three unities, five acts: why not seven persons? For the rules seem to go by the odd numbers.

the same scene, follows as a matter of course from the constant presence of the chorus, who must first be got rid of before there could be any change of place. Moreover, their stage and scenes took in a larger compass than our own: not a chamber, but the open area before several buildings; and the opening of the interior of a palace by means of the eccyclema, may be viewed in the same light as the drawing up of a hinder curtain on our stage.

The objection to the change of scene is based upon the same erroneous notion of illusion which we have already refuted. The removal of the action, say they, to another place wrests the illusion from us. Yes, indeed, if we take the imaginary for the real place: but then we should need to have stagescenery of quite a different make'. Johnson, a critic who in general is very much for strict rules, objects very justly, that if our imagination can once go to the length of transporting itself eighteen hundred years back to Alexandria, to figure to ourselves the history of Antony and Cleopatra, the next step, namely, to transport ourselves from Alexandria to Rome, is easier. The capability of our mind to fly in thought with the swiftness of lightning through immeasurable space and time is acknowledged in common life. And shall the poet, whose very purpose it is to add all manner of wings to our mind, and who has at command all the magic of genuine illusion, that is, of a living and enrapturing representation, be alone debarred this universal prerogative?

Voltaire is for deriving the Unity of Place and Time from the Unity of Action, but his deductions are shallow in the extreme. "For the same reason," says he, "there must be Unity of Place, for a single action cannot be in progress in several places at once." But we have seen that in the one main action there is of necessity a concurrence of several persons, that it consists of a number of subordinate actions; and what should hinder these from proceeding in several places? Is not one and the same war often carried on at once in Europe and

2 It is calculated only for one point of view: in every other position the broken lines betray the imperfection of the imitation. Even as to the architectural import most of the audience give themselves so very little concern, that they take no offence even when the actors make their entrances and exits between the sidescenes, through a wall without any door.

India, and must not the historian exhibit the events on both stages alike in progress?

"The Unity of Time," continues Voltaire, "is naturally connected with the first two.-If the poet represents a conspiracy, and extends the action to fourteen days, he must give me an account of all that passes in these fourteen days." Yes, of all that belongs to the matter in hand: but all the rest he passes by in silence, as every good story-teller would, and it never enters any one's head to wish to have such an account. "If therefore he sets before me the events of fourteen days, we have here fourteen different actions, however small they may be."-Truly, if the poet were so clumsy as to wind off the fourteen days, one after another, visibly, so that there shall be just that number of days and nights, and the people shall go to bed and get up again just that number of times. But he thrusts into the back-ground the intervals which are marked by no visible advance in the action, he annihilates in his picture all the pauses of absolute rest, and with a flying touch gives us an exact, or pretty nearly exact conception of the elapsed interval. But why is the privilege of assuming a wider interval between the two extremes of the play than the material time of representation, important to the dramatist, nay, in many subjects, indispensable? Voltaire's instance of a conspiracy is here quite in place.-A conspiracy plotted and executed in two hours is, in the first place, a thing incredible. Moreover, in reference to the characters of the acting persons, such a plot is quite different from one in which the conceived purpose, however dangerous, is silently persevered in by all the persons for a considerable time. Though the poet does not actually admit this period into his exhibition, he gives us a sort of perspective view of it in the minds of the characters, as in a mirror. In this sort of perspective Shakspeare is the greatest master I know: a single word often opens to view an almost interminable vista of previous states of mind. The poet, who is tied down to the narrow limits of time, is obliged, in many subjects, to mutilate the action by beginning close before the last decisive stroke, or else unbecomingly hurry on its progress: in either case, he is forced to reduce to petty dimensions the great picture of a violent resolve, which is no momentary ebul