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compare Massinger with the Dramatic writers of the present day, in whom shall we find his equal? The golden age of the Drama has passed away. Our present poets can paint the moods of their own minds and can write dramatic poems, but not plays. Their mirrors reflect themselves alone. They do not hold them up to nature and give the very age and body of the time, its form and pressure.

In reviewing the characters in this play, one cannot help wondering that Gifford, notwithstanding his narrow views in criticism, should not have seen the immeasurable inferiority of Massinger to Shakespeare in all the higher attributes of genius. But the critic appears to have been so taken up with the regularity of Massinger's plots, the accuracy of his metre and the purity of his diction, that he overlooked every consideration of a weightier and nobler nature, If in Shakespeare there are greater faults of style, there are far fewer errors of delineation, and in the highest sense of the word, he was a more correct writer than either Massinger himself, or the learned and laborious Jonson. The faults of Shakespeare are errors of taste, and not defects of genius. Where the heart is to be touched or the imagination kindled, he rarely fails. Massinger had an intellect of great force; but, like Dryden, he had no power over the pathetic. Even his great eloquence, his most characteristic merit, is the eloquence of the mind, and not the heart.

It was more than once urged against Shakespeare by his competitors as a weighty objection, that "nature was all his art." It would have served these writers justly if he had retorted that art was all their nature. And, if rightly qualified, there would have been considerable truth in the criticism on both sides.

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AN ADDRESS TO SLEEP.

OH! gentle Sleep!

Bring thy most soothing dream

To calm my spirit now;

And thy soft tresses steep

In Lethe's silent stream

To lave my burning brow!

Oh! faithless maid!

To fly when grief appears,

And the fevered form is laid

On a bed bedew'd with tears!

Alas! in happier hours,

When Peace, thy bridal-maid,

Hath led thee to the secret shade,

Where verdant boughs were twined

O'er gorgeous summer flowers,

Thou wert not so unkind!

Farewell! a brief farewell!

Relenting Fate is nigh,

For swiftly speeds the welcome night, When Death, with unresisted might, Shall make thee haunt the silent cell

Where this worn frame shall lie!

ON THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE OF INDIA THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

SOME of the admirers of Orientalism have battled with more ability than success in favor of the vernacular, in preference to the English language, as a means of communicating the literature and science of the West to the people of India. They venture to compare it with the Latin and the English, and even roundly assert that the Bengali is quite as rich and expressive as either of those languages. It is added that all the subtle distinctions of metaphysics may be taught in Bengali quite as well as in English. How a language which has scarcely any literature at all can be compared for copiousness, flexibility and precision, to a language that has been cultivated for ages by the greatest poets, orators, and philosophers which the world has known, is a riddle that it would be difficult to solve. Bengali compared to English is as lax and meagre, as are almost all other ancient languages compared with Greek. "The obstacles," says Sir James Mackintosh, (in the introduction to his View of the Progress of Ethical Philosophy,) "which stood in the way of Lucretius and Cicero, when they began to translate the subtle philosophy of Greece into their narrow and barren tongue, are always felt by the philosopher, when he struggles to express, with the necessary discrimination, his abstruse reasoning in words which, though those of his own language, he must take from the mouths of persons to whom his distinctions would be without a meaning." If the Latin compared with the Greek is a narrow and barren

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tongue," the same may be said of the Bengali when compared with the Latin, and with equal justice when compared with the English; for the latter has been so vastly improved by careful cultivation, by the taste and genius of a host of native writers, and by the judicious introduction of expressive foreign words, that, perhaps, no other living language may be compared with it for force, fertility and exactness. And yet this language, with all its excellencies, is not even now entirely fitted for the use of the metaphysician, and perhaps never will be. Nothing is more common amongst our authors than the most pathetic complaints respecting the imperfections of the language. Professor Stewart, amongst other eminent metaphysicians, has spoken of the perplexing obscurity, in which mental philosophy has been involved by the vagueness and ambiguity of words. If so comparatively rich and flexible a language as ours, is often found inadequate to express the subtler metaphysical distinctions, how unreasonable is it to imagine that such a language as the Bengali, in its present state, can be successfully devoted to such a purpose! It would take several centuries to bring it to a state of copiousness and refinement.

The obstacles in the way of introducing the English language to the people of India, have been greatly exaggerated by the Orientalists. If there were but one spoken and written language in all India, the objection to the introduction of the English language would seem more plausible; but when we consider the multiplicity of languages and characters already in use amongst the natives, it seems perfectly ridiculous to talk of the difficulty of introducing a foreign tongue. Are not the Arabic and Persian, foreign languages? Is not the greater part of the learning of the East embodied in the Sanscrit ? Would it be a whit more difficult or less useful to teach the living English than the dead Sanscrit? Is the Roman character more hieroglyphycal or less distinct than the Nagree?

Some of our most ardent Orientalists insist upon the necessity of translating the productions of the Western writers into Arabic or Sanscrit, and when they carried every thing before them in the councils of the Committee of Public Instruction, they devoted no less a sum than 65,000 rupees to remunerate Doctor Tytler for the translation into Arabic of six booksfive of them of a medical character, and one of a mathematical! Luckily for the youth of India, Lord William Bentinck had sense and decision enough to put a sudden stop to this preposterous waste of toil and money, and since that time a most wholesome change has been effected in the entire system of Indian education. We now send out of our colleges hundreds of fine-minded youths who are not only familiar with English words, but with English thoughts and feelings. Instead of the old system of bribing boys with a fixed remuneration of some 16 or 20 rupees per mensem to acquire a knowledge of the astronomy of Ptolemy and the medicine of Galen, we have our schools crowded with enthusiastic youths who deem it a precious privilege to be admit ed upon the payment of a monthly sum*, which, small as it may seem, is often given with difficulty and inconvenience. But yet they willingly and proudly make this pecuniary sacrifice for the sake of an acquaintance not with Ptolemy and Galen, or with the Oriental writers of licentious tales, but with Shakespeare and Milton, and Bacon and Newton, and Addison and Johnson! Even the late Doctor Tytler himself, an indefatigable student in Oriental Literature and a violent opponent of the Romanizing system introduced by Sir William Jones, and followed up with so much ardour by Mr. Trevelyan, acknowledges that the English language ought to be "an object, nay, a paramount object, in Native education;" and while he is opposing Mr. Trevelyan's plan of Anglicizing the whole literature of India, on account of its supposed difficulty, or rather its supposed impossibility, he admits that the vernacular

The boys at the Hindu College pay five rupees per mensem.

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