You wish me to contribute to the literary work in which you are engaged; and, if I have hesitated to obey your wish, it is because I very much doubt whether, circumstanced as I am, it can be in my power to suggest any thing that may be useful to your purpose, and worthy of your acceptance. In this scruple I am perfectly sincere, for my avocations at this moment are extremely urgent; however, lest I should be suspected of assuming a feigued self-diffidence for the sake of evading a friendly exertion, I send you a few thoughts, in which you must not look for much method, having thrown them out as they occurred to me, without resort to books, which, in my present situation, are not within my reach: they will not ornament your essays, but if they shall be of any service to those who consult them, I must hope your readers will take my good will in good part, and recollect that the polish of a button does not add to the use of it.

As you have written very amusingly for the stage, and I hope will amuse yourself by writing for it again, I will devote the reinainder of this letter to a few familiar remarks upon Dramatic Style.

That there is an appropriate and peculiar style, to which the comic writer should endeavour to conform, I take for granted. It is so difficult to convey rules for

writing, through the vehicle of definition, that I should at once absolve myself from the task, if I could refer your readers to any one dramatic author on their shelves, whose style I could fairly recommend as comprising all the properties that definition can embrace. But there is

no such author in my recollection, (none such at least that I am prepared to set up as a model) and, presuming therefore that the whole has not been attained in its perfection, I must endeavour to make my conception of it understood by parts.

As I am about to talk to my contemporaries, I will confine my idea of dramatic style to such only as I conceive those writers ought to study and adopt, who propose themselves to be writers for the present day. The old masters are gone by; they must not aim at following them; not because it is impossible to overtake them, but because they get nothing from them to their present purpose, if they join their company. I must be understood as speaking simply and exclusively of style; I have all reasonable veneration, and quite enough to say, for them as examples in another sense; but that would be talking out of my subject, not within it.

The writers of the middle comedy are Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, Steele, Cibber, and some few others; these are to my purpose, and the best of these, in point of style, is Congreve. There are great good properties, and well worthy the attention of the dramatic student, in the writing of his four comedies: it is also a style peculiar to himself, defineable, uniform, and fixed; it is therefore a proper object of contemplation; it may be studied; it is a whole, and as such is capable of dissection. The examiner will find it terse, compressed, pointed; but having used the figurative term dissection, I must warn the novice to beware he does not cut his fingers with his lancet in the process; for there are tainted and unwholesome parts in that fair body. These for the present I shall put aside: his merits are the more agreeable discussion.

I have said his style is terse, compressed, and pointed; his works are doubtless in the reader's memory, and it. hardly signifies to which of them I refer, or which pasI select. Take one from the Way of the World--sage Fainlove says to Mirabel------

"Fain. Are you jealous as often as you see Witwould entertained by Millamant?

"Mira. person.

"Fain.

she has wit.

"Mira.

Of her understanding I am, if not of her

You do her wrong; for, to give her her due,

She has beauty enough to make any man think so; and complaisance enough not to contradict him who shall tell her so.

"Fain. For a passionate lover, methinks you are a man somewhat too discerning in the failings of your mistress.

Mira. And for a discerning man, somewhat too passionate a lover,---&c. &c.

In this short specimen the dramatic student will discover all that I have hitherto described of Congreve's style; he will also observe how he builds one speech upon another, and works his climax point by point: this way of working is the very mastership and mystery of his art. It is worth an author's utmost pains to trace him in this very peculiar faculty of drawing out his dialogue without breaking its thread; an operation, in which he is unrivalled, and distinguishable from all other dramatic manufacturers, that ever took a tool in hand. But let the disciple of this great master be aware how he makes any of his characters copy Fainlove, who announces Millamant as a woman of wit; let no author commit himself to his audience for the introduction of a witty character, unless he is perfectly well provided to make good his promise. This is a stumble at starting, that is very much against a man for the rest of the race, and many, whom I could name, have made it.

One more specimen, as illustrative of this peculiar art in Congreve's dialogue, will suffice, and I take it from the saine comedy---Mirabel, Fainlove and Millamant, are on the stage.

"Mill. One no more owes one's beauty to a lover, than one's wit to an echo; they can but reflect what we look and say,---vain, empty things, &c.

"Mira. Yet to those two vain empty things you owe two of the greatest pleasures of your life.

"Mill. How so?

"Mira. To your lover you owe the pleasure of hearing yourselves praised; and to an echo the pleasure of hearing yourselves talk,"

This we might conceive is quite point enough; and if an ordinary poet had got so far, he might consider himself in a happy vein; but Congreve's Echo has more replications than one, and Witwould---" knows a lady, that loves talking so incessantly, she won't give an echo fair play; she has that everlasting rotation of tongue, that an echo must wait till she dies, before it can catch her last words."

I need not give any more quotations from this author to the point in question. Let the pupil of dramatic style digest this thoroughly, and put himself upon a regimen after this prescription, and he will find his constitution much the better for it.

But I alluded to certain parts, that I conceived could not be handled without danger, or, to speak in simpler terms, where Congreve is no model for an author to follow; and I must go a little about to come precisely to the point I aim at. In common life there is nothing so out of character as an under-bred man, when he grows familiar, and puts himself at his ease with you. This remark ought to be everlastingly kept in sight by writers for the stage. If they have not obtained a knowledge of the style and manners of people in high and elegant life, by consorting with them before they set about to represent them on the stage, they had better never think of making the attempt; for if they look to Congreve for their prototypes, they will not find them with him: if they resort to his table for clean and wholesome fare, they will only be entertained with tainted fragments, disguised by high-seasoned sauces and stimulating spices. Let an author also recollect that, whilst he is copying the style of Congreve, he must be well aware how he copies his indiscrimination in the management of it. Every character is not to sing in unison like a Russian chorus, and let him be assured it is not in the power of style to compensate for the sacrifice of character.

As for the rest of the comic writers above mentioned, I see very little in the style of any one of them, which distinguishes it from that of any other. The Conscious Lovers of Steele is very properly denominated a moral

essay in dialogue. If a man was to dilate upon a simple incident to his company, as Sir John Bevil does to his servant Humphry, he would set them asleep. Cibber is somewhat rounder and closer in his Careless Husband; but all his characters love talking, and there is very little point in their dialogue: Vanbrugh's period is not epigrammatic, and Farquhar's conversation is the ri baldry of a mess-room.

The dramatic writer should consider that he has a great many things to do, and a number of characters to display in a small compass. He has not the expanse of a novel to give him room for proposing story-tellers, and dealers in description.. His fable is never to stand still; nor his characters to languish and forget themselves; he is therefore to take a close review of every scene after he has written it; and calculate how he could conduct it with equal clearness in fewer words: if he does this, he will find that, whilst he compresses it into brevity, he will work it into point; and at the same time that he brings his periods into a smaller compass, he will be able to give them a more brilliant polish. If he would produce a striking character before his audience, let him have something to say so marked that the audience may remember it, and take it home with them when he has effected this, let him take heed how he talks too much; for if he drenches his wine with too great a dose of water, it will be but a mawkish draught. A fertile imagination will oftentimes run away with a man's style, and render it as thin, as bullion when drawn into wire, or beaten into leaf; if he has not temper and self-denial to control these impulses, he is not fit to be a writer of the drama, which requires two qualities, that rarely meet in the same man, a vivid fancy and a cool deliberate judgment.

I am,

Dear Sir, &c. &c.

RICHARD CUMBERLAND.