Posilippo in goppo; the sides of the hill are covered with delightful Masserie and vineyards, where a good strong wine is produced. On the hill there are many of that particular species of pine, which has something the appearance of the upper part of a parachute when opened. The scenery along the road and on the hill, and indeed, all around, is exquisitely beautiful; and though so near a noisy capital, these uplands are rural, quiet, and retired; indeed, from the tranquillity and loveliness of the place, it merits the name bestowed upon it, Pausilypum, or repose from sorrow.

The road runs along the ridge of the hill, and leads to the Vomero and Sant Elmo: some four or five years ago an attempt was made to render it passable for carriages, but the work stopped after a short time, as all public works are apt to do in this country.

The Strada Nuova, of which we have spoken, is one of the sorties from Naples, and is, we think, the finest; it offers scenery beautiful, varied, and inexhaustible, in which the painter may study the finer parts of his art, and often as we have walked along it, we never return to it without fresh delight.

The road next to this in beauty leaves the city in a contrary direction, and leads to the Campo di Marte; this is called La Strada Nuova del Campo; it goes out of the city by the Studj, passes through the Largo delle Pigne, and along a broad dull street called Foria, leaving on the left the Orto Botanico, and the Seraglio, a house built, as the inscription says, to contain all the poor in the kingdom; but which, though it is certainly enormously large, would not contain the poor of the capital, and which is, as usual, left, alla Napolitana, unfinished. The road continues to run on straight until, reaching the great northern road to Rome, which goes off to the left, it begins to ascend, and winds gradually along the hill, commanding fine views of the plain lying between it and Vesuvius. As we keep along the heights we see below us the Campo Santo, a low quadrilateral building, enclosing a paved area, divided into three hundred and sixty-five squares, in each of which is the mouth of a vault, the

whole of the place being excavated: every day one of these vaults is opened, and the bodies of the poor who die in hospitals, &c. and who cannot pay for the privilege of mouldering in the churches of Naples, are deposited there; the vault is then closed, and remains shut for a twelvemonth, another vault being opened the next day, receiving the dead, and then being shut in the same manner. The apertures of the vaults are small, and closed by a ponderous stone, which is further secured by cement; and thus, in a great measure, the effluvium is prevented from escaping. This establishment is very useful, as it removes a great source of corrupted air from the city; it is kept very clean, and emits in general very little smell, considering the numbers of the dead that are continually putrifying there; but there is one circumstance in the ceremony of the place which is scandalous, not only to Neapolitans, but to human nature itself, that is, the indecency and brutality with which the obsequies of the dead are performed: the bodies are stripped quite naked, and thrown through the narrow apertures down into the deep vaults, one upon another, in a confused heap; the mouth of the vault is frequently stained with blood, in consequence of the bodies being pitched rudely and unskilfully down. But a few days ago we were walking there, and looked into one of the vaults, where several bodies had just been thrown down-the sight was too horrible to be described, we wish we could forget it! We observed a woman who was employed there in saying prayers for the repose of the dead; she walked as she prayed, and appeared to have the intention of passing over every vault, as she went up and down the files regularly; when we came away the gates were locked upon her, and she was left to her solitary devotions.

But let us return to the road, which soon after this passes near the church of La Madonna del Pianto, so called from the melancholy events which followed the siege of Naples, by Lautrec, in 1528; unwilling to bombard the city, he cut off the aqueducts which supplied it with water; the water running to waste inundated and stagnated on the plain, and the vapours which arose from it made

DRURY-LANE THEATRE.

Roman Actor.-Mountaineers.- -The Waterman.

Notwithstanding the strong alJurements held out in these three pieces, Kean's benefit was but thinly attended-a pretty plain proof that something more than the drama itself is requisite to call the public to the theatres. Our pleasures, we suspect, are not quite so pure and intellectual as human nature in its vanity would willingly believe; fine acting and fine writing are indeed the ostensible motives with all play-goers; but what share in the evening's amusement have the crowd, and the lights, and the decorations? There must be, moreover, the stimulus of novelty or of fashion; and as far as concerns Kean, both the one and the other have long since past away, or if there be any fashion in regard to him, it is a fashion of dislike. The fault, however, rests in a great measure, perhaps entirely, with himself; he cannot, it is true, invest himself afresh with the charms of novelty; yet he ought to make himself more popular, not by paltry arts, or by becoming the mountebank of any society, but by a fair and honourable discharge of his duty as an actor. Let him too be more chary of his good name; for the audience, whether right or wrong, will mix up the private with the public character; and he who is to live by the people, must not despise the humours of the people.

The first of these pieces is nothing more than a prelude from Massinger's play of the same name, from which it has borrowed so much of the first and third scenes as was calculated for the display of Kean's talent, and only Kean's. This, to say the least of it, is a very paltry ambition,-this grasping after every thing in the style of most judicious Bottom, of asinine memory," Let me play Thisby too -let me play the lion too." If he goes on at this rate Mr. Elliston may dismiss the rest of his company, and he and the manager may divide the drama between them, each having as many notes of admiration tacked to his name, as he plays characters. VOL. VI.

This will chime in gloriously with the avarice of the one and the vanity of the other; then if the manager has small receipts, at least he will have small outgoings; and if the actor gets little praise, he yet will have that little entirely to himself, without any need of division with his brethren. What can be better than such an arrangement? Try it, gentlemen; by all means try it, and pray do not forget us, your gentle counsellors.

We should have said thus much in the way of reprobation even if the prelude had been dexterously put together; for a bad design, though well executed, does not change its character of evil; but this was not the case; simple as his task was, the compiler has contrived to commit two blunders, and those of no little magnitude; why, in the name of dulness, must he give the part of Latinus to Junius Rusticus? This metamorphosis of a Roman senator into an actor was remarkably judicious, and the more so as nothing was to be gained by it except the praise of ignorance, in regard to Massinger as well as history. Not satisfied with this, he has blended Aretinus with Tiberius; and thus, in defiance of all probability and common sense, and to the utter ruin of the scene, we have Aretinus playing the double part of a friend and an enemy, an informer and an emperor. Nor was there any thing in Kean's performance to reconcile us to these enormities; great as he has shown himself on many occasions, his "Roman Actor' was equally bad in conception and execution: the Paris of Massinger pleads his cause in a strain of manly and fervid eloquence, as remote from violence as it is from weakness; he attempts to convince, not to overawe, the senate; for how indeed could a poor actor hope to frighten the Patricians of Rome by a few big words? It is not even an appeal to the passions, but to the understandings, of men ; and the slight sarcasm aimed at Aretinus is so guardedly couched that it may pass either for satire or compliment. Yet in defiance of these ob vious truths, Kean was overbearing,

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familiar, and sarcastic, pompous without dignity, and violent without energy. This is the more surprising as he is undoubtedly the first orator upon the stage; and as to dignity, he has enough of that when he chooses. Notwithstanding the vulgar prejudice on this subject, dignity has nothing at all to do with the stature; it is entirely a thing of intellect, and its expression depends on manner, not on a man's being tall or short. If this were not so, little could be said for Kean's Othello, which is yet the triumph of the modern school of acting. What can be more noble than his quiet rebuke of Cassio's intemperance?" How comes it, Cassio, you are thus forgot?" What more dignified than his appeal to the senate? What more sublime, more terribly sublime, than the passion of his jealousy?-We must, therefore, look to some other cause for his failure in The Roman Actor," perhaps to his neglect, for he can do nothing without study; the contrary indeed has usually been imagined of him, but it is a notorious fact to those at all acquainted with his habits, that he never has succeeded in any character so hastily adopted. Hence it is that he has so frequently failed in new plays, his indolence not permitting him to give them the requisite attention.

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Of the few others that performed in this little prelude, we may say with Grumio, "the rest were ragged, old, and beggarly." By the bye, while we are on this subject, we wish Mr. Barnard would inform us who is Agave; we have heard indeed of a certain Agave, of whom both Ovid and Horace speak, though we only quote from the first:

Adspice, mater, ait. Visis ululavit Ăgāvē. Is this the lady that Mr. Barnard meant when he talked of Agave?

The next piece on the list of the evening's entertainments was The Mountaineers, in the second act of which Kean's Octavian was no better than his Paris ; but in the cottage scene, both before and after the entrance of Floranthe, he was brilliant beyond the power of words to do him justice. Indeed he acted the part rather as it ought to be than as it is; for Colman, while intending to write the Janguage of madness, has written only

downright nonsense, and that too in verse which is verse only to the eye, or when counted on the fingers: but poor as the materials were, the ac tor contrived to work wonders with them, and exhibited a fearful scene of insanity struggling with the return of reason. Nothing in art could be finer than the alternate light and sha dow that played upon his face, like the fitful blazings of a fire, flashing up for a moment to sink again into utter darkness. There was a painful consciousness of the truth expressed in every feature, a wavering between reason and insanity, till the fit again came on him in all its strength, and then it seemed to tear up his very soul There was an irresistible and sweeping grandeur in his passion that made him in form a giant-it was a visible emanation of the mind, fresh and glowing from the fountain-and the expression of superior intellect, whatever is its character, can never be called little.

If we compare Kean's Octavian with that of Kemble (the only thing to which it can be compared), we should be inclined to allow the preference to the former. There was a quiet grandeur in Kemble's acting that gave it all the effect of a marble statue-it was bold and beautiful in the outlines, but it wanted colour; his mind, like his features, was noble; but, like them, it was too rigid, too little flexible, to put on any form that was not native to it; he wanted that pliability of mind and face which is the highest excellence of Kean, and perhaps of all acting. Kemble was always himself, always peculiar, and his peculiarities were a little apt to mix up with the general varieties of feeling. Kean is only peculiar by some vile tricks that too often stare out of his assumption of character and betray the individual; but then he has the power of flinging them off when he pleases; and there are times when it does please him to wear the mask most closely. He has less of that grandeur which belongs to sober reason, and more of that which springs from the energy of passion, than was the case with Kemble. His voice too is infinitely more rich and varied, notwithstanding the objections raised against its hoarseness, objections that have originated in people confounding full round tones (like those of

Young and Macready) with a voice of compass and flexibility. His Octavian was an instance of this, and a striking instance. At the same time we object entirely to any superiority being allowed him on the score of his being more natural, a phrase that is most cruelly abused; his acting was natural just as much as a fine picture or a fine statue is natural, but no farther. There is an essential difference between all the works of art and nature, distinct from all the differences that may arise out of inequality-for many a subject that is exceedingly unpleasant innature, becomes the very reverse in its imitation. The products of the two therefore cannot be precisely the same, for they do not bring with them the same association of ideas; nor is it desirable that they should do so, for we find that imitation does not delight in exact ratio to its resemblance with any given reality; if it did, a wax figure, which has form and colour, would please much more than a marble statue, which has form only, both qualities being a part of natural objects, and the wax figure therefore being the nearest in its likeness to nature. There seems to be in every work of art a something superadded to nature, which, in the absence of a more definite name, the world is content to call poetical, and which, as far as it has reference to the present business, means nothing more than the association of other and more pleasant ideas than belonged to the object of imitation. Hence it is that so few local descriptions correspond with the reality; the ideas that are called up by the description are not the same as those excited by the things themselves, when subjected to the sight; and yet at the same time the features of the imitation may be so very like the subject imitated, that it would not be an easy matter to find a single point of difference. The subject, how ever, is one of considerable difficulty, and is not to be settled by a few brief assertions, the results rather than the proofs of our conviction; but we have no space at present for pursuing the question any farther, for there is still much matter upon our hands, and indeed more than we well know what to do with; to do full justice to the demerits of the Drury-lane Company would require half our Magazine, and

we must therefore hasten to despatch them as rapidly as may be.

In the hands of Fitzwilliam and Miss Cubitt, the parts of Killmallock and Agnes were" much abused,"and Harley, from whom we have a right to expect better things, was very indifferent in Sadi. His humour was by no means characteristic of the Moor, yet still it was humour; and, as it tickled the fat ribs of laughter, it might pass well enough for the novice. But his pathos will never do; he must confine himself to such parts as are purely comic, and those too of a peculiar class; they must be full of life and bustle, and depend on sprightliness for their effect rather than that rich oily kind of humour which characterizes Munden. It is by these that he first gained his good name with the public, and it is by these he must retain it. But we are weary of the task of censure, and pass over the rest to come to Kean's Tom Tug, a still, beautiful piece of acting, that only wants to be more known to become a subject of general admiration. Like his tragedy, it has nothing in common with any existing school of acting; there was no grimace about it, no effort to produce a barren laugh by any trick of voice or manner; it was a true and perfect character, and differed from the waterman of real life only by the superaddition of that poetic colouring which is the charm of art, and which we have already noticed as distinguishing it from nature. The great aim of most comedians is to excite laughter, no matter by what means; with Kean, on the contrary, truth of character is the first object-if it contain the seeds of the ridiculous, well and good; but he does not go out of his way to seek for it. His singing too was of the same school, and consequently no less delightful to those who can overlook the absence of all science for the sake of expression; indeed it was rather speaking to mu sic than what is usually understood by the term singing; but with all our love for the vocal art, we are inclined to suspect, that this thing, sine nomine, is the more delicious of the two, and we are quite sure that it is the most intellectual.

This evening may be considered the close of Mr. Elliston's season, as far as criticism is concerned; for though