"My good Francis," exclaimed Agatha, affectionately, and gave him her hand, even before the eyes of her stern parent.

"If we both live," said Onophrius, with peculiar emphasis, " if we both live, I will remind you of your promise; but I fear that we shall not get so far; I fear that this day's tumult will have worse consequences than you imagine. That Bieler has been killed is a sad misfortune. The

nobles will be mad, and I already begin to shudder at the idea of the jail and the scaffold,"

"Is Bieler, then, really dead ?" asked Francis anxiously, after a long silence.

"I saw him carried as a corpse to the Guildhall," replied Onophrius. "The thing, too, happened naturally enough. As my left hand flew off, I cut at his head with my right, and you soon after made an end of him." "Upon all this we 'll be silent to every one," said Francis, who had again collected himself. "For the rest, the whole business is of no great consequence. I was acting in self-defence; and you were only doing your duty. If any ill have grown out of it, Rasselwitz, who began the strife by breaking into my house, must be the sufferer."

"That won't satisfy the nobles," said Onophrius, shaking his head. "Let them bite away their anger upon their nails," exclaimed Francis boastfully. "My father is master here in Schweidnitz, and will not let them hurt a hair upon my head."

"You are safe,-but I!" replied Onophrius, thoughtfully.

"You stand and fall with me, old friend. If I ever forget you, or what you have this day done and suffered for me, may God forget me in my dying hour!"

"Amen!" murmured Onophrius with failing voice, and, swooning with the loss of blood, he dropped from his seat.

"He is dying!" sobbed Agatha, as she caught her father in her arms. "This is a day of evil," shouted Francis, gazing for a moment on the mischief he had wrought, and striking his forehead wildly with his clenched hands, he dashed away.'-Vol. i. pp. 30-37.

Upon this scene all the subsequent interest of the tale may be said to hinge. The incensed nobles urge the Bishop of Breslaw, prince palatine of the province, to make a rigid inquisition of blood in atonement for that of the murdered individual of their body. The bishop arrives in the city with a formidable_train of the provincial nobles, compels the refractory burgomaster Erasmus, and his principal council, by menaces, to submit the enquiry to the imperial jurisdiction; and immediately commands the burgomaster to arrest his own son Francis, and Onophrius the messenger, as the principals in the fray. They are immediately thrown into the city prison, and the messenger is put to the rack. But meanwhile the wife of Francis dies; and the messenger, confiding in his solemn promise to repair his Agatha's honour, refuses to give any information to inculpate him, and endures the most frightful torture without confession. With the true German appetite for horrors, Agatha is made at the same time to burst into her lover's apartment, whence both of them can distinctly hear the piercing groans

of the aged sufferer. In her agony at the sounds, the distracted Agatha implores her lover to save her father by the confession of his own guilt. He endeavours to persuade her that his interference, a prisoner himself, would be powerless to stop the torture; and she then leaves him, with the asseveration that, if he does not at least save the old man's life by a timely acknowledgment, he shall himself perish- that she will bend all the energies of her soul to his destruction, and will haunt him through life as his evil demon, until her vengeance shall fearfully light upon his head.'

Her menaces are of no avail; the messenger survives the rack only to be led to execution; and the revenge of the nobles being satisfied with this humble victim, the guilty son of the burgomaster escapes. Before the old man's execution he sends for his daughter, and commands her to require of Francis the fulfilment of his solemn promise to make her his wife. She appears again before her seducer in his prison; he obdurately spurns her suit; and she then warns him, that having, in obedience to her father's dying injunctions, offered him the power, which he rejects, of making that atonement to the spirit of her parent, she will henceforth pursue him with vengeance to the uttermost. Holding up to him the white garland of roses with which the citizens had crowned her father before his execution, and which was now covered with his blood, she warns him that her curse shall scare sleep from his bed, and drop wormwood into his cup of joy, until he shall one day see her adorned with that garland, as his bride for the life yonder in the torments that have no end.' She then rushes from him; and though he endeavours to have her denounced and arrested by the burgomaster's authority, she disappears and evades all pursuit.

Meanwhile the business of the tale proceeds in a kind of underplot. Althea, the virtuous widow of Bogendorf, is induced to promise her hand to a worthy nobleman, Tausdorf, the brother in arms of her last husband; and Christopher Friend is filled, by the rejection of his suit, with malevolent hatred towards both of the affianced pair. Then follows the catastrophe of the piece. Agatha reappears in the disguise, first of a courtezan, and then of a gipsey. She haunts Francis Friend with mysterious and appalling predictions; she attempts some abortive schemes of vengeance; and finally working upon Christopher's hatred to Tausdorf and Althea, and to his own brother, she succeeds by his means in provoking a quarrel between the noble knight and Francis, in which the latter falls by his antagonist's sword. In his dying moments she appears to her perjured lover, arrayed in the withered and fatal garland; she destroys herself to accompany him to the world of torments; Tausdorf is iniquitously executed by the vengeance of the old burgomaster, for a deed in which he had only drawn his sword in self-defence; and Althea sinks into the grave broken-hearted. Finally, two of the friends of Tausdorf discover the villainy of

Christopher Friend, and after reproaching him with his crimes assassinate him in his bed; and the old burgomaster dies miserably, bereft of both his unworthy sons and of his ill-used power.

In the brief sketch which we have given of the heads of this tale, the reader will easily recognize all the peculiarities of German imagination and taste; and we have selected it for analysis because it is one of those which enjoy the greatest popularity in the original language. The second tale Master Flea-is a wild farrago of magicke and faierie," in which the most conspicuous actor is the king of the fleas! By the way, the author might more correctly have rendered the title of this story The Master Flea :-the title Meister, without an article before a surname, designating, as all the German world knows, a master tradesman, in contradistinction from a fellow mechanic. The two next tales,' The Blind Passenger,' and the Adventurers,' have no remarkable features, beyond those of mere lively and superficial narrative, to recommend them; and the concluding story of the series-The Mantle' -is chiefly notable as a fairy tale of King Arthur's court, in which Naubert has copied the old fable of the magic mantle, which would fit only the chaste and pure in person and deed. He has, however, related, with much humour and some novelty, the scene of this famous ordeal of feminine chastity.

This brief account of Mr. Soane's specimens of German romance will suffice to introduce the collection to such of our readers as have any partiality for the subject. We have only to add, that the translator has executed his task with careful industry and considerable spirit; and the work will altogether, as may be supposed, serve agreeably to beguile a few idle hours, and not be out of place among the lighter literature of our book-clubs and reading-rooms.

ART. IV. Dramaturgische Blätter von Ludwig Tieck. 2 Vols. 12mo. Breslau. Black and Young. London. 1826.

THIS work consists of a series of most judicious and valuable critiques on several pieces produced at the Dresden theatre. The author, the celebrated Ludwig Tieck, well known by his poems and tales, and who has devoted his attention for many years to the theatres and theatrical compositions of his own and other countries, enters into a close and critical examination of the pieces performed, and of the actors who represented them. The principles he lays down are so good, and his reasonings from them so judicious, that we feel no hesitation in strongly recommending the work to the attention of the genuine lovers of the drama in this country, as his observations will be found to apply with nearly equal force to our own as well as to the German theatre.

The German is, as is generally known, the latest formed theatre of Europe, except the Italian theatre of Alfieri. It had indeed an

old mystery and morality theatre of Hans Sachs and others; but the Spanish and English theatres rose, attained their greatest elevation, and declined, before Germany saw any thing like the drama of real life and action. Its first attempts were made in the commencement of the last century, in slavish imitation of the theatre of the French, who at that time were diffusing the baleful influence of their literature over Europe.

The efforts of Lessing, one of the most clear-headed, sensible critics and writers that Germany has produced, were unceasingly directed against the French taste, and in the well known and admired Hamburg Dramaturgiæ he laboured unceasingly to bring back his countrymen to nature from the formal conventional theatre of France. Lessing was also a dramatic writer himself, and he was at first of opinion that the true language of the drama was prose: some of his earliest and best pieces were prose compositions; but his latter ones, such as Nathan the Wise, were written in rather a rugged species of blank verse. Goethe and Schiller gave in their master-pieces the true models of the species of verse suited to the German language and theatre; but, unfortunately, Schiller in his Jungfrau, Marie Stuart, and more especially in Die Braut von Messina, gave too much into the epic and lyrical style. His example has been followed and carried to its utmost extent by Müllner, Grillporzer, Houwald, and others of the present day, who have farther, by an ignorant and injudicious imitation of the Spanish theatre, introduced the trochaic in the room of the iambic measure into their pieces, and thus established a species of singsong the most sickly, effeminate, and, to the ears of true taste, the most disagreeable that can be conceived. With this they have united the most improbable actions, and the most unnatural characters: a new kind of destiny also pervades their pieces, more inexplicable and more inimical to human happiness and exertion than that of the drama of ancient Greece.

Comedy also, which never flourished much in Germany, for

natio non comoda est,

has been by Iffland and Kotzebue formed into a maukishly sentimental domestic sort of affair, with wonderously kind, amiable, good-for-nothing personages figuring as fond fathers and mothers; good-natured, indulgent husbands, who lovingly take back to their bosoms a wife who has only been guilty of the slight indiscretion of going off and living with another man; and such other faulty monsters, which would to heaven our own theatre could plead innocent to the charge of having also employed in her service.

Against all this corruption of taste and degradation of rational and moral entertainment Mr. Tieck raises his voice in the present work, and we will lay before our readers some specimens of his criticisms, to enable them to appreciate his taste on dramatic subjects. The principal pieces criticised are Kleist's Prince of Homburg,

a play of which the critic expresses himself in high terms of approbation. The Anna Boleyn of Gehe, Schiller's Wallenstein, Körner's Tony, the Zinngiesser, taken from Holberg; the Leuchtthurm, and Der Fürst und der Bürger, of Houwald; and Romeo and Juliet, Schlegel's translation of which was, with some alterations, most admirably performed at Dresden.

The Anna Boleyn is a very indifferent piece, but as it belongs to the new school, and as the reader may be gratified with comparing the plan of it with that of Mr. Milman's late drama of the same title, we will give from Mr. Tieck some account of it.

After a very faithful and accurate description of the period in which the scene is laid, and of the historical characters who were the principal actors in it, Mr. Tieck observes, that no more promising subject could present itself to a young poet, and then proceeds thus:

If our young poet has been unable to employ much or even most of these materials, let this not be made any objection to him. It has been frequently maintained, that a young writer will succeed more easily in tragedy than in comedy, because the latter requires throughout maturity and experience. This prejudice can only proceed from those who have no insight into the essence of tragedy. No doubt a young person may easily treat any subject in a moving and sentimental manner, and excite sadness or even tears; but still he has not written a tragedy, any more than he who has put together a merry story in a droll manner has composed a comedy. The whole affair, when we look a little closer, comes to this, that mediocrity or deficient talent can, with the aid of a language already formed of traditional phrases, situations, and sentiments, which lie as it were coined to the hand, sooner produce something which is like a play, than that the same incapacity could invent the ridiculous, for which at least some portion of humour is requisite.

The play is divided into three acts, besides a prelude. In the latter we learn the king's love for Anne, and his separation from Catharine, so that a space of three years elapses between this prologue and the play. This division is unhappy, for so much time is occupied with masques, processions, and superfluous pieces of description, which convey no more to the spectator than might have been done by a few verses in the piece.

The charge made against Anne of illicit intercourse with her own brother is very properly omitted, the religious parties and their conflicts are kept out of sight, and Gardiner, who is Bishop of Winchester, is introduced as secretary of state. All this is well enough; but why, asks Mr. Tieck, is not Norris, one of the queen's servants, which would give probability to her too condescending intimacy with him? It is because the poet would then have lost the opportunity of making him a monitor, a perfectly disinterested personage, the friend and play-fellow of Anne's youth, and her first love.

'He ranges himself then under the banners of those lately-produced beings, who appear in so many of our new pieces, who only love, and will throughout do nothing else but love-who know no passion, scarce even a wish-who talk so nobly, so good-naturedly, and so magnanimously, and who, with my consent, may be excellent personages in real life, but who should be completely banished from the boards of the