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tenor of his life, and gradually lessened the distance of his journey through it, without obscuring the serenity of the prospect. Unimpeded by sickness, and unclouded by sorrow, or any serious misfortune, his life was a life of temperance, of selfdenial, and of moderation in all things; and of great regularity. He rose early in the morning, ante diem poscens chartas, and was constant on horseback at his usual hour, and in all seasons. His summers were uniformly passed at Cheltenham, with his family, during the latter part of his life; and upon his return to Bath in the autumn, he fell habitually into the same unruffled scenes of domestic ease and tranquillity, rendered every day more joyous and interesting to him by the increase of his family circle, and the enlargement of his hospitable table; and by many circumstances and occurrences connected with the welfare of his children, which gave him infinite delight and satisfaction."

At the beginning of 1805, he experienced a sudden and general failure of his bodily faculties, and a correspondent depressure of mind. The little confidence he placed in the power of medicine made him reluctantly comply with the wishes of his friends, that he should take the opinion of Doctor Haygarth. Yet he was not without hope of alleviation to his complaints from change of air; and, therefore, removed from Bath to the house of his son-in-law, Mr. Bosanquet, in Wiltshire. Here, having at first revived a little, he soon relapsed, and declining gradually, expired in the eighty-first year of his age, without apparent suffering, in the possession of his intellectual powers, and, according to the tender wish of Pindar for one of his patrons—

ὑιῶν, Ψαύμι, παρισταμένων, in the midst of his children.

He was buried in the parish church of Walcot, in the city of Bath, in the same vault with his fourth daughter the wife of Rear-Admiral Sotheby, and her two infant children.

A cenotaph has been erected to his memory among the poets of his country in Westminster Abbey, by his eldest son, the Rev. Christopher Anstey, with the following inscription:

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To this there is an encomium added, which its prolixity hinders me from inserting.

A painter and a poet were, perhaps, never more similar to each other in their talents than the contemporaries Bunbury and Anstey. There is in both an admirable power of seizing the ludicrous and the grotesque in their descriptions of persons and incidents in familiar life; and this accompanied by an elegance which might have seemed scarcely compatible with that power. There is in both an absence of any extraordinary elevation or vigour; which we do not regret, because we can hardly conceive but that they would be less pleasing if they were in any respect different from what they are. Each possesses a perfect facility and command over his own peculiar manner, which has secured him from having any successful imitator. Yet as they were both employed in representing the fortuitous and transient follies, which the face of society had put on in their own day, rather than in portraying the broader and more permanent distinctions of character and manners, it may be questioned whether they can be much relished out of their own country, and whether even there, the effect must not be weakened as fatuity and absurdity shall discover new methods of fastening ridicule upon themselves. They border more nearly on farce than comedy. They have neither of them any thing of fancy, that power which can give a new and higher interest to the laughable itself, by mingling it with the marvellous, and which has placed Aristophanes so far above all his followers.

When Anstey ventures out of his

own walk he does not succeed so well. It is strange that he should have attempted a paraphrase of St. Paul's eulogium on Charity, after the same task had been so ably executed by Prior. If there is anything, how ever, that will bear repetition in a variety of forms, it is that passage of scripture; and his verses, though not equal to Prior's, may still be read with pleasure.

The Farmer's Daughter is a plain and affecting tale.

His Latin verses might well have been spared. In the translation of Gray's Elegy there is a more than usual crampness; occasioned, perhaps, by his having rendered into hexameters the stanzas of four lines, to which the elegiac measure of the Romans would have been better suited. The Epistola Poetica Familiaris, address

ed to his friend Mr. Bamfylde, has more freedom. His scholarship did him better service when it suggested to him passages in the poets of antiquity, which he has parodied with singular happiness. Such is that imitated in one of Simkin's Letters: Do the gods such a noble ambition inspire? Or a god do we make of each ardent desire? from Virgil's

Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt, Euryale? an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido? a parody that is not the less diverting from its having been before gravely made by Tasso:

O dio l'inspira,

O l'uom del suo voler suo dio si face. On the whole, he has the rare merit of having discovered a mode of entertaining his readers which belongs exclusively to himself.

BEAUTIES OF THE LIVING DRAMATISTS.

SELECTED FROM UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS.

I FORGET Who it was, that, on beholding some stupendous monument of the labour and ingenuity of former times, exclaimed, "How much less durable is man than his own works!" There is much general truth in this remark; yet there is one class of human labourers so very far without the pale of its application, as, indeed, to form an exemplification of the direct reverse of it. The industrious persons to whom I allude are our living dramatists. By "living dramatists," I do not mean Shakspeare, Congreve, Farquhar, Sheridan, and others, who, in a higher sense of the phrase, may be so termed; but the bona fide cating, drinking, walking, (I had nearly said thinking) and scribbling gentlemen, who still go on adding to our stock of rational pleasures; the immortals who serve as a sort of posterity to themselves, by having, some of them, outlived, by at least ten years, the eternity of fame they promised themselves twenty or five-and-twenty years ago. To a poet, how frightful is the idea of falling into absolute nothingness, and leaving "not a rack behind!" How melancholy to behold his own column of renown, erected with so

much labour, stone upon stone, mouldering in decay, and sinking into oblivion; "to see fame," as the Irishman said, "walk away with itself.” How agonizing the reflection, in his own particular case, that "man is much more durable than his own works!" These considerations have operated powerfully on my mind: and it is with the humane intention of sparing the élite of our cotemporary dramatic geniuses a portion of this moral suffering, that I have undertaken the task of collecting a few of their scenes, and ensuring them a perpetuity of fame by enshrining them in the pages of the London Magazine.

But, besides this, I have another object in view in this enterprize, one of more extensive utility, namely, that of assisting the progress of such of the rising generation as may be ambitious of increasing our stock of dramatic literature. Cotemporary fame is fickle; the chef-d'œuvre that brings all London together at the beginning of the season, is forgotten long before the end of it; and thus the young aspirant to dramatic honours is left destitute of the models by which alone his taste ought to be

formed, and without which, as his constant guides, success is hopeless. Would he compose a rural, agricultural, Sunday-schoolical, farcical, melodramatical, comedy, all about love and murder, in the style of M-rt-n; a naval and military loyal effusion, in five acts, à la D-bd-n; a genteel comedy, à la Sk-ff-n; a sweet opera, in the manner of D-m--d; or a wonder-stirring melodrama in all styles, or in no style; which way shall he look for assistance? The glorious models offered for imitation by these worthies, alas! are already scattered, lost, and forgotten; and he must either follow the impulses of his own taste and genius,-write from his own pure inspirations-or lean on the arm of Congreve and Sheridan, now too weak even to support themselves; and neither of these alternatives is likely to prove to his advantage in his dramatic career. It is for this purpose, as well as to save them from the oblivion in which a few weeks would otherwise have involved them, that I collect together a few slips and patterns of the favourites (not of the day, but) of yesterday, and deposit them in a museum, where the student may, at his ease, contemplate the finest models, in the various branches of dramatic composition, which modern times have afforded.

"And why not," (says the first person that happens to take up this paper)" why not allow a young writer to follow the impulses of his own taste and genius?" Because, if you did, he would exhibit human nature as he finds it-ordinary men and women, of common proportions, having neither more nor less than one head, two arms, and two legs each. "Well?"-well; and at Bartholomew fair such beings would not draw a halfpenny; there you must exhibit giants or dwarfs, monsters having something extraordinary in their conformation-two heads, or eyes in their stomachs. "I am speaking of our national, patent, legitimate-drama theatres; you reply with Bartholomew fair."-"Tis all one. "But Congreve, Farquhar, Sheridan—why not allow them to serve as dels?" Because Congreve, Farquhar, and Sheridan, are out of fashion. "And why are they out of fashion?"

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For the same reason that truth is out of fashion with an habitual perverter of it; that the charms of nature, fresh green fields, and clear blue skies, yield no pleasure to a debauchee who has wallowed sixty years of his existence in the vilest dissipation the town affords; or that light delicateflavoured Burgundy seems insipid to the palate of a dram-drinker. I believe I make myself intelligible; so " question me no further." The days are gone when an English audience could find delight in five acts composed of nothing better than such absurdities as a probable plot, natural characters, wit, and common sense. I shall not pretend to decide whether the public taste is better or worse than it was; I merely assert that it is changed; and that what satisfied the audiences of our good old play-writers would not now satisfy the spectators of our modern playwrights. The public has removed its seat of judgment from where it was formerly placed, to a point as distant from it as pole is from pole, though an inch may compass the space between-from the ear to the eye. But I meant to say only a few words as an introduction to the following scenes, and I am wandering into a preface. The public taste is such as it is. Many causes have contributed to make it so ; and none more effectually than the genius of our modern dramatists.

I have already stated my motives for making the following collection; it would be useless to recapitulate them. The scenes which will be given are from original and unpublished manuscripts. Each is so deeply imbued with the peculiarities of its respective author, his beauties, and the characteristics of his style, that it will be needless to give his name at length-his initials only will be added to the title of his work. I may, perhaps, occasionally subjoin a note, or short commentary, for the purpose of pointing out any latent beauty, or placing it in a more advantageous light, or exhibiting those less obvious peculiarities by which the particular author under consideration is distinguished from his compeers.

Without further delay, I present the reader with

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Scene. The interior of Farmer Wheatsheaf's cottage. In a corner of the apartment hangs a side of bacon. On a table in front is seen Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a Cheshire cheese, and a brown jug. Through the opening at the back, a farm-yard, with pig-stye, hen-coop, dunghill, several ploughs,* ploughshares, plough-tails, plough-men, plough-boys, &c.

Enter FARMER WHEATSHEAF, followed by DAME WHEATSHEAF.
Farmer. I tell 'ee, deame, it be o' noa youse; I wonna do't.†
Dame. What! not if my lord do tell 'ee?

Farmer. (Firmly.) Noa; for there be another Lord (pointing upwards) as do tell I not.

Dame. Why then, Gaffer, as sure as eggs bean't bacon, you'll be clean out of my lord's books.

Farmer. Books! Lookee, deame; thof I be nought but Gaffer Wheat

A person observing that there was always a deep interest in Mr. Manother replied, "True; but it is always the agricultural interest."

-n's plays,

The decline, or, strictly speaking, the fall of the British drama has been attributed to the present uniform state of society. The collision of ranks and interests, it is said, has so smoothened and polished us, and rendered one human being so exactly like another, that the dramatic painter can no longer find prominent and characteristic materials for the employment of his pencil. But I suspect that those who utter this complaint draw their notions of society, not from an observation of society itself, but from the pictures which pass for true representations of it on the stage; and I am of opinion that society is very little to blame in the matter. There was plenty of character in the year 1500, but there was no MOLIERE. SHAKSPEARE found characters as long as he chose to look for them, so did CONGREVE in his time, so did SHERIDAN much later, so does KENNY NOW. Even REYNOLDS, who with an extraordinary talent for observation unluckily combined a very coarse taste, exhibited, in his earlier productions, many lively and natural sketches. PICARD, DUVAL, and some other of the best French dramatists, even up to this very moment, occasionally find a character which has escaped the search or observation of former writers, or which, at least, had not been exhibited in all the various points of view of which it was susceptible, and in which a skilful artist might place it. The fact is, that matter is not wanting for those who know where to look for it, or how to use it where they have discovered it, but that—I will illustrate what I was going to say by an anecdote. I one day called on a portrait painter, who complained bitterly to me of his want of patronage. "To be candid with you," said I, 66 you seldom catch a likeness, and never give character to your portraits." "And whose fault is that?" replied he: "likenesses now-a-days are damn'd hard to catch-faces are not what they were in Sir Joshua's time." The truth is, my friend was a bad painter.

But as a compensation for the absence of character (properly so called) from the modern drama, we have dialect. The honour of the invention of this easy and palpable expedient is, I believe, due to the author of "Virtue's Harvest Home." To hold the mirror up to Yorkshire, is the precept by which the efforts of this gentleman have been invariably guided. Farmers and clod-hoppers, from the East Riding or the West Riding, from Somersetshire or from Devonshire, are his eternal models. He is the very Shakspeare of the farm-yard. His clod-poles are clod-poles from top to toe. Imitation, however, is dangerous; and his success in the clod-hopper line has tempted so many unskilful adventurers to follow him, that I almost curse the hour when a sentimental ploughboy, or a pathetic team-driver, was first introduced on the stage.

sheaf, there be one book I do vally more nor ony other. Do thee know, missus, what that book do zay?

Dame. Noa; I can't zay as I do.

Farmer. More sheame vor thee, deame, more sheame vor thee, I zay. Then I'll tell 'ee. It do zay-Thou shalt commit no murder.

Dame. Truly and zoa it do, Gaffer, and zoa it do.

Farmer. I ha' gotten a bit o' a notion as how that be plain spoken enough, deame; and I wonna kill him * vor all the lords

Dame. (Greatly agitated.) Kill him! kill whoa, Gaffer?

Farmer. (Still more agitated than Dame.) Don't ask I, don't ask I ony thing about it.

Dame. Well, I won't, I won't. (Aside.) Ifackins!

I must know all

about it though. But only tell I who is to be killed, Gaffer. Farmer. (If possible, more agitated still.) Killed! whoa talked o' killing! Killing be murder, and murder be- Dom thee, hold thy tongue, missus; hold thy dom tongue, wool'ee? My brean do turn round, just for all the world like the sails o' yon windmill.

Dame. Be a bit cool, Gaffer; be a bit cool.

Farmer. (Recovering himself.) Lookee, deame, if I were to do zoa

I should never be able to do zoa. (Striking his bosom.) †

Dame. No more thee would, Gaffer; no more thee would. Never care what my lord do zay. Come, gi' thy old deame a buss.

Farmer. First o' all, deame, can thee do zoa? (Striking his bosom.)
Dame. (Hesitating.) Noa-yes—I-

Farmer. O deame, deame!

Dame. (Collecting herself.) Yes, Gaffer, thof we be poor-I can do zoa. (Striking her bosom.)

Farmer. Then thee beest my old deame after all. (They rush into each other's arms.)

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Dame. But here do come my lord.

Farmer. (More agitated than ever.) Do he! do he! But why do I tremble zoa? I ha' gotten a clear conscience yet o' while. O deame, deame! the clearest pond in my lord's garden be thick and muddy to a clear conscience; and the straightest hop-pole in the whole county be not half so upright as an upright heart. (He removes the side of bacon, and discovers a secret door, through which they pass.)

Enter LORD BLUEDEVIL. His countenance is pale and haggard; he has one hand in his bosom, the other in his breeches-pocket.

Lord B. Yes, it is decided. The hated thing that breaks my rest, and interrupts my feverish and agitated slumbers, must be destroyed. If still this obstinate and headstrong loon refuse to perpetrate the deed, again the hand of Bluedevil, that hand already saturated with the crimson stream of life, must be dipped and stained, nay, plunged and empurpled in gore. But no: Wheatsheaf must be the agent of my vengeance. On earth

* Mr. M-n is often praised for the serious interest he contrives to throw into his comedies; and the praise bestowed on him is not unmerited; for most of his comedics are as serious as rape, robbery, and murder, can make them. Folly, in all its varieties, the lesser vices, and the comic side of the greater ones, alone employed the pens of our elder writers of comedy; but the MODERN THALIA, with laudable industry, takes cognizance also of high crimes and misdemeanours. The snivelling hussey has had the address to steal her sister's bowl and dagger; and seldom appears in public without a pocket-handkerchief at her nose. For my own part, I like to cry at a comedy; but as there are many persons who still entertain sundry prejudices in favour of old-fashioned definitions, and whose fancy it might be well, and would be easy, to humour, why does not Mr. M-n give his productions the title of Five-act Melodramas? For (I just whisper it in your ear) such they are.

Three gentle taps: not like the pert rat-tat-tat of an apprentice on Sunday, but the signal of a lover at his mistress's window--a sort of passing call, to know whether conscience is at home. This certain test of virtue is very liberally employed in all our author's plays, and never fails of exciting applause.

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